Charles van Beveren

Charles van Beveren first came to Holland to copy a painting. A patron, Baron de Pret, sent the young painter from Mechelen north to copy The Night School by Gerrit Dou, the 17th-century Leiden master of small candlelit scenes. Van Beveren had trained at the academies of Mechelen and Antwerp, and at the Antwerp competition of 1826 he won more prizes than any of his fellow students. He settled in Amsterdam in 1830, the year the southern provinces broke away to become Belgium, and made his life on the Dutch side of the new border.

Illness took him to Italy in 1832, where he studied the painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1834, after another stay in Italy and a visit to Paris, he came back. His early work was portraits and genre scenes, small and finely finished, among them The Praying Nun. After 1840 he turned to biblical subjects such as Judith and Hagar and painted them with a broader, bolder brush. He had joined the Amsterdam Royal Academy in 1837, and in 1850 the Royal Institute of the Netherlands elected him a correspondent. He died in Amsterdam that September, aged 41.