Anthonie Palamedesz.

Anthonie Palamedesz. worked in Delft during the Dutch Golden Age, the 17th-century boom when a small republic grew rich on trade and ordinary citizens began buying paintings by the thousand. He supplied two things that market wanted: tidy small portraits, and 'merry company' scenes, elegant young people in silk gathered around a table to drink, play music and flirt.

His interiors are quiet and grey-toned, lit through tall windows, full of the manners of well-off Dutch life. His brother Palamedes was a specialist too, in the noise and smoke of cavalry battles, so between them the family painted both the parlour and the battlefield. Anthonie spent his career in Delft and its guild, a generation before the town's most famous painter, Vermeer, was born there.