 Backer never married, never bought a house, and might have lived with his brother or nephew Adriaen Backer, who also became a portrait painter.He died in Amsterdam, in his early forties.His extreme quickness in painting portraits has been particularly noticed, and Joachim von Sandrart wrote in his "Teutsche Academie" that a woman came from Haarlem and went home the same day, in which short period of time her portrait, cuffs, fur, collar, together with the rest of her dress and both hands, was handsomely completed in a life-sized half-length.