Arent de Gelder

By the time Arent de Gelder set up as a painter in Dordrecht, the rough, shadowy manner of his old teacher had fallen out of fashion. Rembrandt died in 1669, poor and unfashionable, and Dutch buyers now wanted smooth surfaces, bright colour and a French polish. De Gelder ignored all of it.

He had trained twice, first with Samuel van Hoogstraten, a Dordrecht master, then around 1661 in Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio, among the last pupils the old man ever took. What he learned there he never gave up. He built his paint up thick, dragged it with the palette knife and even pressed it into place with his fingers, the way the late Rembrandt had.

He could afford to please himself. De Gelder came from a well-off family and did not need to chase the market, so he spent his career on Old Testament stories, returning again and again to the book of Esther. Working on alone in Dordrecht into the 1720s, he was the last living link to Rembrandt's workshop, still painting like the 17th century while the 18th went on without him.