Huygh Pietersz Voskuyl

In 1638 an Amsterdam portrait painter painted himself and lettered his age beside his signature, 46. That inscription is one of the few firm facts about Huygh Pietersz Voskuyl. He was born in Amsterdam around 1592, trained with the painter Pieter Isaacsz, and spent his working life making likenesses of the city's burghers.

The archives add only a little more. In 1640, aged 47, he married Grietje Fransdr, a woman from Gorinchem, and eight children were baptised over the next 20 years. His best-known commission is a pair of portraits of the Amsterdam brewer Philips Denijs and his wife Geertruyd Reael, now in the Rijksmuseum. Some of his pictures later passed under the name of the younger and far better known portraitist Bartholomeus van der Helst. Voskuyl was buried in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam's oldest church, in October 1665.