Jan Hackaert

In the mid-1650s the Amsterdam painter Jan Hackaert spent several years travelling through Switzerland with a sketchbook, several times in the company of the Zurich artist Conrad Meyer, and they went up into the high mountains to draw them from life. The early biographer Arnold Houbraken, who collected the lives of the Dutch painters, tells that labourers who watched Hackaert at work suspected him of witchcraft and hauled him before the authorities.

The drawings were made for Laurens van der Hem, an Amsterdam lawyer who was turning the great printed atlas of the Blaeu firm into a private collection of many volumes, filled with maps, prints and views he commissioned from artists. Hackaert's Swiss sheets are still in it, in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

Back home he painted landscapes in the warm, golden light that Dutch painters had brought back from Italy, although it is unclear whether he ever went there himself. For the people and animals he often relied on specialists, and Nicolaes Berchem and Adriaen van de Velde, both successful Amsterdam painters, added the figures to several of his woods and avenues. He was baptised in Amsterdam in 1628, and the last record of him dates from 1685.