David Ryckaert III

Three Antwerp painters in a row were called David Ryckaert, grandfather, father and son. This one is the third, born in December 1612 and taught by his father, a landscape painter and art dealer. An uncle, Marten, painted landscapes too. His sister Catharina married Gonzales Coques in 1643, a portraitist the city nicknamed the little Van Dyck.

He became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1636 and its dean in 1652, and he made his living from peasants — tavern interiors, card games, smokers, the sort of thing Adriaen Brouwer had made fashionable a few years earlier. Around 1640 the rooms in his pictures began to fill with better-dressed company making music. One of his buyers by then was Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Southern Netherlands and a collector on a scale few could match.

Later he turned to demons. The Palatine Gallery at Palazzo Pitti holds two of his Temptations of Saint Anthony, one on canvas and one on panel. In the canvas the hermit is pressed by a young woman and by a monster playing a lute. An 18th-century French writer on Flemish painting, Jean-Baptiste Descamps, put these devil pieces after 1650. Ryckaert died in Antwerp on 11 November 1661, at 48.