Jacob Appel
1680–1751 · Dutch Republic · Baroque
The story
Jacob Appel spent almost his whole life in Amsterdam, where he was born in 1680 and died in 1751, and much of what is known about his training comes from the French biographer Jean-Baptiste Descamps, who gave him a short life and an engraved portrait in his lives of Northern painters in 1764. As a boy, from 1690 to 1692, Appel studied with the painter Timotheus de Graaf, then took lessons in landscape from the Amsterdam painter David van der Plas.
According to Descamps, he began by imitating Antonio Tempesta, the Florentine etcher of hunts and battles, and then changed course to follow Albert Meijeringh, an Amsterdam painter of Italianate landscapes with classical ruins. Landscapes and portraits remained his trade for the rest of a long career.
His best-known picture is of a different kind. Around 1710 he painted, on parchment, the cabinet dolls' house of Petronella Oortman, the wife of an Amsterdam silk merchant, and that painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in the same room as the dolls' house itself.
