Daniel Vertangen

Daniel Vertangen's best-known picture, painted around 1660, shows Jan Valckenburgh, who twice served as director-general of Elmina, the Dutch West India Company's fort on the coast of present-day Ghana. The Company organised the slave trade there. Behind Valckenburgh stands a young African man who had been enslaved, holding a gold medal. The canvas is in the Rijksmuseum, which also owns the matching portrait of Valckenburgh's wife, Dina Lems.

Little else is recorded about Vertangen's life. He was born in Amsterdam in 1601, worked there most of his life, and died around 1683. The early biographer of Dutch painters Arnold Houbraken called him a pupil of Cornelis van Poelenburch, a painter of small Italianate landscapes, though no record of that apprenticeship survives. Vertangen too painted landscapes and scenes from mythology and allegory.