Christoffel Bisschop

In 1860 Christoffel Bisschop travelled to Hindeloopen, a small town on the Zuiderzee in his home province of Friesland, known for its painted furniture and its old local costume. The trip gave him the subject of his career. From then on he painted old Hindeloopen rooms, with their tiled walls, painted cupboards and women in traditional dress.

Bisschop was born in Leeuwarden in 1828 into a merchant family. He trained in Friesland, Amsterdam, Delft and The Hague, and then in Paris with Charles Gleyre, a Swiss-born painter who ran one of the city's best-known teaching studios. From 1855 he worked in The Hague, painting portraits, genre scenes and episodes from Dutch history, among them the Arctic explorers Heemskerck and Barents planning a voyage, now in the Rijksmuseum.

In 1869 he married the English painter Kate Swift, his former pupil, and in the 1880s the couple lived in Scheveningen, the seaside village next to The Hague, in a villa they named Frisia. Bisschop died in 1904. The two of them had collected art and antiques on a large scale and left the whole collection to the province of Friesland, and the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden still shows it in rooms arranged like their studio.