Abraham de Pape

In 1648 the painters of Leiden, who until then had no guild of their own, founded the Guild of Saint Luke, and Abraham de Pape was among its founding members. He was a Leiden man, born there before 1621, and an 18th-century biographer counted him among the pupils of Gerrit Dou, the painter who made the city known for small, minutely finished pictures, the style called fijnschilderij, fine painting.

De Pape worked the same way, slowly and in close detail, on scenes of everyday life. The biographer wrote that he finished his little pieces very elaborately in the manner of his master. He came from a well-off family and did not have to live from his brush. An inventory of his stock drawn up in 1656 lists almost 100 pictures, at least 16 of them copies after Dou, alongside subjects of his own such as a violin player, a hermit and a lacemaker.

Only a few of his paintings survive, among them a Tobit and Anna in the National Gallery in London. He died in Leiden in 1666.