Bartholomäus Sarburgh
1590–1637 · German
The story
Around 1620 a German painter named Bartholomäus Sarburgh settled for a few years in Bern and produced some of the finest portraits of his career. He had probably learned the trade in The Hague, in the circle of the Dutch portraitist Jan van Ravesteyn, and he carried that polished, fashionable manner south with him.
Sarburgh never stayed long anywhere. Born about 1590, he turns up in Bern, then in Basel in 1621 and again in 1628, in Cologne, and back in The Hague by the 1630s, following commissions across the map as a sought-after painter of faces for wealthy sitters. One of his portraits in Basel shows the old French poet and soldier Agrippa d'Aubigné, a Protestant veteran of France's wars of religion who had fled to Switzerland in his last years.
The record thins after 1637, and even the year of his death is uncertain. The portraits he left in Basel and Bern are most of what remains of him.
