Adam Pynacker

By the middle of the 17th century a whole group of Dutch painters were selling warm, golden southern landscapes to buyers in Amsterdam and Delft, hills bathed in Mediterranean light that looked nothing like the flat, grey country they lived in. Adam Pynacker belonged to this second generation of Italianate landscapists, and the odd thing is that no document proves he ever crossed the Alps at all. The Italy in his pictures may be one he assembled from other men's paintings.

What sets his hand apart is the way he handles light and leaves. He liked to pick out a silvery tree trunk or a spray of foliage against deep shadow, and to let branches twist across the scene in restless, almost decorative rhythms rather than the calm classical order his rivals preferred. In several of his canvases the leaves have turned a strange cold blue over the centuries, because a yellow glaze he laid over blue underpaint has faded, so a green wood now reads as azure.

Pynacker worked in Delft and Schiedam and ended his career in Amsterdam, painting harbours, wooded riverbanks and travellers on southern roads. He was buried there in March 1673.