Cornelis Troost

Before he painted, Cornelis Troost acted. From 1719 he was on the stage of the Amsterdam Schouwburg, the city theatre, and in 1720 he married an actress, Susanna Maria van der Duyn. In the early 1720s he trained with the portrait painter Arnold Boonen, and around 1723 he left acting for painting.

The theatre stayed in his work. He painted scenes from the comedies performed in Amsterdam and designed stage sets. His best-known series, the five NELRI pictures in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, follows a group of gentlemen through one long drinking evening, each scene carrying a Latin inscription whose first letters spell the title. Troost often worked in pastel and gouache, and his humorous look at Amsterdam's parlours and streets has invited comparison with William Hogarth, the English satirist of the same years.

His first big commission was a group portrait of the inspectors of the Collegium Medicum, Amsterdam's medical board, in 1724. In the Rijksmuseum his self-portrait hangs near a garden behind an Amsterdam canal house, painted in 1742, and a portrait of a member of the wealthy Van der Mersch family. He had eight daughters, and one of them, Sara Troost, became an artist herself. He died in 1750 and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.