Aert Pietersz

In 1601 Sebastiaen Egbertsz, the lecturer in anatomy to Amsterdam's surgeons, commissioned Aert Pietersz to paint a canvas almost four metres wide. It shows him holding a pair of scissors over a body while 28 members of the surgeons' guild crowd around. By the time it was finished in 1603, five of the men in it had died of the plague. It is often called the oldest surviving painting of an anatomy lesson, made some 30 years before Rembrandt's Dr Tulp, and it hangs today in the Amsterdam Museum.

Aert was a son of Pieter Aertsen, the Amsterdam painter of market and kitchen scenes, and he earned his living mostly with portraits of the city's citizens. The Rijksmuseum gives a moralising picture of 1599, Rich Children, Poor Parents, to Aert, or possibly to his brother Pieter Pietersz, also a painter.

On a terrace a well-dressed couple stands with their five children, one riding a hobby-horse, another holding a small dog. On the left the husband's parents, now poor, come down the stairs to ask for help, reminding their son that they put all their money into his hands. His answer is painted on a banner beside him. He has nothing to give them, he says, because he has his position to keep up.