Jacob van der Kerckhoven

Jacob van der Kerckhoven learned to paint in Antwerp, trained under Jan Fyt, a Flemish specialist in hunting scenes and animals. That apprenticeship set the course of his whole career, because van der Kerckhoven became a painter of still lifes: dead game, live birds and beasts, and heaped fruit.

Sometime before 1683 he moved to Venice and stayed, and there he did something telling. He took an Italian name, calling himself Giacomo da Castello after Castello, the district of the city where he lived. Under that name he prospered, becoming a painter to the Doge of Venice and selling to English aristocrats on the Grand Tour. The Earl of Exeter commissioned four canvases from him in Padua in 1684.

His still lifes turn up again and again in Venetian household inventories over the next two centuries.