Hendrick Heerschop

Hendrick Heerschop's pictures are crowded with things. Doctors, alchemists and scholars sit among glass flasks, heavy books and brass mortars, and the early biographer of Dutch painters Arnold Houbraken remembered him as a painter of conversation pieces, small scenes of people talking in rooms. The eye for objects came early. The son of a Haarlem tailor, he trained in the 1640s with Willem Claesz. Heda, the Haarlem master of quiet still lifes in pewter and glass, and he was probably also taught by Rembrandt in Amsterdam.

He joined the Haarlem painters' guild in 1648 and painted portraits, biblical and classical stories and genre scenes. The dates of his life are uncertain. He was born in Haarlem in the 1620s, and sources disagree about when he died. One of his best-known pictures, The Alchemist's Experiment Takes Fire, records the moment a laboratory experiment goes up in flames and now belongs to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.