Jan Ekels the Younger

A man sits at a table by the window, cutting a fresh point on his quill. A mirror above the table catches his face, an inkwell stands beside him, and a jacket hangs over the chair. Jan Ekels the Younger painted this small panel in Amsterdam in 1784, when he was 25.

He was the son of a painter of the same name, who trained him. From 1776 to 1778 he studied in Paris, where he met French painting, including the quiet domestic scenes of Chardin, and learned to value the 17th-century Dutch painters of interiors, Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch. Back home he won first prize at the Amsterdam drawing academy in 1781, and in 1783 he joined Felix Meritis, a new Amsterdam society for the arts and sciences, and travelled up the Rhine to Düsseldorf. The Rijksmuseum points out that he probably never saw a painting by Vermeer, yet the light falling on his writer recalls him.

Ekels never married, and after an inheritance from his mother he lived on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat. He died in 1793 at 34, probably of a stroke, and was buried in the Nieuwezijds Kapel in Amsterdam.