David Vinckboons

David Vinckboons was born in Mechelen in the southern Netherlands in 1576, into a Protestant family that kept moving north to stay ahead of the Spanish armies, until it settled in Amsterdam. He carried a whole tradition north with him.

His model was Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the great painter of peasant weddings and village fairs, and Vinckboons filled his own panels with kermis scenes: crowds eating, dancing, brawling and flirting outside a country inn. He also painted elegant companies at leisure in park-like gardens. Both kinds of picture, the rowdy and the refined, fed straight into the Dutch genre and landscape painting that would flower over the next 50 years.

Van Mander, the writer who chronicled these artists, noted that Vinckboons had no teacher but his own father, a painter of watercolours on cloth.