Jacob van Geel

In 1628 a painter in Delft told a notary that he was about 43 years old, and that passing remark is still the best evidence for when Jacob van Geel was born. Much of what survives about him comes from records like it. He sat on the committee of the painters' guild in Middelburg, the Zeeland port, from 1615, moved to Delft in 1626, and after his wife's death, with creditors pressing him, joined the guild in Dordrecht at the end of 1634.

His paintings show nothing of that life. At a time when Dutch landscape painters were turning to dunes, polders and real skies, Van Geel kept painting forests that never existed, crowded with gnarled trees, deep shade and small figures on the paths, in the tradition that the Flemish painter Gillis van Coninxloo had brought north a generation earlier.

The Dutch art historian Laurens Bol catalogued 22 of his pictures, almost all on panel, and later added seven more. One of them, an imaginary wooded landscape, hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.