Abraham Lambertsz van den Tempel

In the governors' room of the Lakenhal, the old cloth hall of Leiden, hang three large allegories that Abraham van den Tempel painted for the building around 1650. In one of them the Maid of Leiden, the city in the form of a young woman, welcomes a girl who stands for the cloth trade, while Minerva, Mercury and Justice look on and Liberty kneels with a broken lance. The subject was close to his own life. When he married in Leiden in 1647, the records list him as a cloth merchant.

He was born in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, in 1622 or 1623. His father, Lambert Jacobsz, was a painter and Mennonite preacher who had trained Govert Flinck and Jacob Backer, both later successful painters in Amsterdam. Lambert died in 1636, and Abraham went on to study with Backer.

In Leiden he became a master in the painters' guild in 1657 and took pupils, among them the young Frans van Mieris, later known for small, finely finished interiors. Portraits of prosperous families made up most of his work, among them one of Pieter de la Court, a Leiden cloth manufacturer and political writer. In 1660 he moved to Amsterdam, the city where he had grown up, and worked there until his death in 1672.