Jacob Savery the Elder and/or studio

The words and/or studio are the Mauritshuis being careful. A picture under this name, a village fair of about 1598, is signed Jaq.s. Savery, yet the museum leaves open how much of it was painted by assistants in his Amsterdam workshop rather than by Jacob Savery himself.

Savery was born in Kortrijk in Flanders around 1565. His family were Anabaptists, and around 1580, for fear of the Spanish authorities, they left the town. He trained with the landscape painter Hans Bol, married in Haarlem in 1587 and became a citizen of Amsterdam in 1591. His younger brother Roelant learned the trade from him and later became court painter to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Jacob died in Amsterdam during a plague epidemic and was buried on 23 April 1603.