Jacob Adriaensz Backer

Jacob Backer arrived in Amsterdam as a trained painter just as another newcomer, Rembrandt, was making his name there in the 1630s. Backer had learned his trade in the north, in the Friesland workshop of Lambert Jacobsz, alongside Govert Flinck, another future Amsterdam portraitist. In the city he and Rembrandt became the kind of rivals whose clients overlapped.

Where Rembrandt worked light into deep shadow, Backer kept his portraits cool, smooth and evenly lit, with a silvery elegance that wealthy Amsterdam liked. He was quick. One old account has him finishing a woman's portrait in a single day. In about twenty years he made some 140 paintings, roughly half of them portraits, along with large biblical and mythological scenes.

He never married, and he died in 1651 at 42, at the height of his reputation. For a long time much of his work passed under Rembrandt's name, and only later study handed the pictures back.