Aert van der Neer

Most Dutch landscape painters chased daylight. Aert van der Neer went the other way and built a career on the dark. From the late 1640s he specialised in nocturnes, small river scenes lit only by the moon, and in their opposite, the orange glow of a village burning at night. He raised that light by laying down layer after layer of translucent and opaque paint until it seemed to float on the water.

He worked the other great Dutch obsession too, winter, with skaters strung out across frozen canals under low grey skies. The skill was real and admired, and his moonlit views now hang in the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty and half the great collections of Europe.

None of it paid the bills. Around 1659 he opened a wine tavern in Amsterdam to make ends meet, and in 1662 the business went bankrupt. He kept painting to the end and died in debt in 1677. His son Eglon became a painter too, of elegant, well-dressed interiors that sold far better than his father's quiet nights ever had.