Isaac van Kipshaven

Almost everything known about Isaac van Kipshaven comes from a few signed paintings and a handful of records. He was born in Amsterdam around 1635. The records place him in Nijmegen, a town on the river Waal in the east of the Dutch Republic, at the end of the 1650s, then back in Amsterdam in the 1660s, and he was still alive in 1672. After that he disappears from view.

He painted pronk still lifes, from the Dutch word for show, tables loaded with costly things such as silver, fine glass and exotic fruit. The type took shape in Antwerp and was taken up by Amsterdam painters in the 1650s and 1660s.