Hans de Jode

On the evening of 25 August 1647 a group of young painters out walking in The Hague found themselves followed and harassed by two men. In the scuffle that followed, one of the painters, Hans de Jode, wounded one of the men so badly that he died on the spot, and de Jode left the city that same night. Most of what came after has to be pieced together from his paintings.

He seems to have gone first to Venice and then probably to Rome, and the few works that can be placed in his Italian years include two landscapes signed and dated 1657, now in Verona. By 1659 he was in Vienna. A view of the Topkapı palace in Constantinople that he painted that year is sometimes taken as proof that he travelled there, though it may have been assembled from printed views. The one firm document from his Vienna years is his wedding, on 8 January 1662, in the Schottenkirche, a Benedictine abbey church in the city. No painting of his dated after 1661 is known. Between 1677 and 1680 Prince Karl Eusebius of Liechtenstein, a great collector, bought 11 of his pictures for his palace at Valtice in Moravia.