Adriaan de Lelie

In the winter of 1794 to 1795, as French armies overran the Dutch Republic, Adriaan de Lelie was finishing a picture of two rooms on the Herengracht in Amsterdam. The merchant Jan Gildemeester had turned them into a private picture gallery, and De Lelie shows the walls hung frame to frame, with a Rembrandt above the owner's head. Gildemeester stands talking with a guest in spectacles, the painter Jurriaan Andriessen is among the visitors, and De Lelie put himself in too, kneeling in the foreground. The painting is in the Rijksmuseum.

De Lelie was born in Tilburg in 1755. He trained with a painter of tapestries and ornament, then in Antwerp, and made copies after Rubens and van Dyck in Düsseldorf. On the advice of the anatomist Petrus Camper he settled in Amsterdam, where he became a portraitist and the painter of the city's collectors and societies at home among their pictures. He also painted the drawing academy of Felix Meritis, Amsterdam's society for arts and sciences, with its members at work. He died in Amsterdam in 1820.