Hendrik van Steenwijk II

Some of the court portraits painted in London under Charles I have architecture by Hendrick van Steenwijck behind the sitter. Settled in England by 1617, he painted the colonnades, arches and palace halls in which Daniel Mytens and Anthony van Dyck, the leading portraitists at the English court, placed the king and his courtiers.

Perspective ran in the family. His father, Hendrick the Elder, was one of the first painters to make the interior of a church a subject in its own right. Born in Antwerp around 1580, the son grew up in Frankfurt, where the family moved in 1585, and took over his father's workshop there in 1603. Back in Antwerp he worked with Jan Brueghel the Elder and with Frans Francken, who painted small figures into some of his church interiors. Around 1638 he moved to The Hague. His wife Susanna, herself a painter of architecture, moved to Leiden around 1642, and he died there in 1649.