Cornelis Pietersz Bega

Cornelis Bega spent his whole short life in Haarlem, the Dutch cloth town where he was born around 1631. He learned to paint from Adriaen van Ostade, the town's master of peasant scenes, and took up the same world: a few figures crowded into a dim tavern or cottage, drinking, dozing, making music.

Some of his liveliest pictures step just outside the everyday, a lone alchemist among his jars, an astrologer at his charts, half comic and half serious. He was admitted to Haarlem's Guild of St Luke, the painters' guild, in 1654.

His career lasted barely ten years. In 1664 the plague swept through Haarlem, and Bega, still unmarried and only in his early thirties, was among the many it killed.