Eglon van der Neer

Eglon van der Neer painted small, jewel-like pictures of well-dressed people in richly furnished rooms, a lady at her breakfast, a couple at cards, finished so smoothly you can almost read the weave of a satin sleeve. That polish was the fashion of the Dutch fijnschilders, the 'fine painters,' and he sharpened it by looking hard at Gerard ter Borch and Frans van Mieris, the masters of the manner.

He was born in Amsterdam around 1635, son of the landscape painter Aert van der Neer, and took the elegant road rather than his father's moonlit rivers. As a very young man he spent four years in the south of France working for a count, then built a busy career back in the Netherlands and in Brussels.

In 1690 he took the grandest post of his life, court painter to the Elector Palatine at Düsseldorf, the ruler of a Rhineland state, and stayed there until his death in 1703. He was much admired in his own century and through the 1700s, and it was only in the 19th century that the fashion for him faded.