Govert Flinck

Govert Flinck came to Amsterdam around 1633 as a young man to study with Rembrandt, and for a few years he painted so closely in his teacher's manner that buyers could barely tell the two apart. Then he did something Rembrandt never managed. He read the changing taste of wealthy Amsterdam, smoothed his style toward a brighter, more elegant finish, and made himself the most sought-after portrait and history painter in the city.

By the late 1650s that success brought the biggest prize going. Amsterdam had just finished its enormous new Town Hall on the Dam, the building that is now the Royal Palace, and Flinck won the commission to fill it with 12 huge history paintings of the ancient Batavians, the tribe the Dutch claimed as their ancestors.

He barely began. Flinck died suddenly in 1660, only 45 years old, with the cycle scarcely started. The work was parcelled out to other hands, among them his old teacher Rembrandt, whose contribution was taken down after about a year and returned to him. Flinck's finished paintings still hang in Amsterdam, and in the palace he did not live to decorate.