Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten

Early on the morning of 7 July 1652 the old town hall on the Dam in Amsterdam caught fire, and within hours the medieval building was a shell. Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten, a 30-year-old painter living in the Jordaan district, made the disaster the subject of some of his best-known pictures. He painted the hall in flames, with crowds and fire buckets in the square, and he painted the blackened ruin afterwards, while the new town hall, begun four years earlier, was still going up beside it.

That eye for real buildings runs through his work. He painted Amsterdam under snow, and village churches and castles across the Dutch provinces, many of them since demolished, which makes his canvases useful records today. He also painted the sea battles of the First Anglo-Dutch War against England and of the later war with Sweden, big scenes of gunsmoke and shattered rigging, as well as southern harbours such as Civitavecchia, the port of Rome.

He was the son of a tablecloth maker from Emden, and he and his first wife had twelve children. From 1651 the family lived on the Rozengracht, the canal where Rembrandt, by then bankrupt, came to live in 1658. Beerstraaten was buried in the nearby Westerkerk on 1 July 1666.