Abraham Teerlink

In 1807 Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's brother and the new King of Holland, gave three young painters a stipend to study abroad. One of them was Abraham Teerlink from Dordrecht, then 30, a landscape painter trained in his home town. He spent about a year and a half in Paris, copying in the Louvre and working under Jacques-Louis David, the leading French painter of the day, and reached Rome in 1809. He never returned to the Netherlands.

Teerlink settled in Rome for good and made his living from the Roman Campagna, the countryside around the city, painting shepherds, cattle and ruins, and the waterfalls at Tivoli that travellers already came to see. He taught many of the Dutch and English visitors who passed through, married the painter Anna Muschi in 1836, and kept sending pictures to exhibitions at home. In 1839 King Willem I made him a knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. He died in Rome in 1857, aged 80.