Frans van der Mijn

Jan Pranger stands at a table covered with papers, a commander's baton at hand, while an enslaved African servant holds a parasol over him. Through the window there is a fortress. The setting is Elmina, on the coast of present-day Ghana, the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company's slave trade in West Africa, which Pranger ran as director in the 1730s. The company's initials are on the tablecloth. The Rijksmuseum records that he sailed home by way of Suriname with about 170 enslaved people on board, and that the man in the painting came with him to Amsterdam as a servant.

Frans van der Mijn painted this canvas, more than two metres tall, in 1742, at the start of his years in Amsterdam. He was born in 1719 in Düsseldorf, where his father Herman, also a painter, was working for the Elector Palatine, and all six of Herman's children became painters. Pranger married Machteld Muilman in 1745, and Van der Mijn painted her as a companion piece, in the couple's house on the Singel canal, with a coffee urn and a picture gallery behind her.

He later settled in London and sent a portrait to the Society of Artists exhibitions every year from 1761 to 1772. An 18th-century account says his pipe and his drinking put off the people who sat for him. He died poor in his rooms in Moorfields, London, in 1783.