Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen

Amsterdam in 1500 was a tidy provincial trading town, still a century away from the golden age that would make it famous. It had painters, but we know none of their names, with one exception. In that year a man from the nearby village of Oostzaan bought a house on the Kalverstraat and set up a workshop. He is the first Amsterdam artist history can actually name: Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen.

He worked two trades at once. As a painter he turned out richly detailed religious panels in the old Netherlandish manner, all fine surface and crowded incident. As a designer of woodcuts he was even busier, producing around 200 of them, prints that carried his invention far beyond the pictures a single patron could own.

The workshop outlived him. His son Dirck Jacobsz carried it forward, and a young pupil who trained there, Jan van Scorel, later went to Italy and returned to reshape Dutch painting. Van Oostsanen kept to the older, hand-crafted manner himself, and died in Amsterdam in 1533.