Jan Lievens

In the late 1620s two very young painters were working side by side in the town of Leiden in the Dutch Republic, and for a while it was hard to tell them apart. One was Rembrandt. The other was Jan Lievens, a year younger, and at the time arguably the more precocious of the two.

Lievens had been a prodigy. He was sent to train in Amsterdam as a boy and was running his own studio back in Leiden by the age of 12. When Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the Prince of Orange and one of the sharpest judges of art in the country, visited the pair around 1628, he was dazzled by Lievens' boldness and grand ambition, and thought he might even outdo Rembrandt in some things.

For a few years the two shared models, props and ideas so closely that even their contemporaries mixed up their pictures. Then their paths split. Lievens left for England and the court of Charles I, then for Antwerp, where the sweeping elegance of Anthony van Dyck and Rubens reshaped his style into something grander and more courtly.

He spent his later career as a sought-after painter of portraits and large decorative commissions in Amsterdam and The Hague. For a long time afterwards his reputation was overshadowed by the studio-mate he had once rivalled, and a number of his finest early works spent centuries hanging under Rembrandt's name.