Jan Miense Molenaer

Jan Miense Molenaer ran a two-painter household unusual for its day. In 1636 he married Judith Leyster, herself a gifted painter of lively everyday scenes, and the couple kept a shared studio, first in Haarlem and later in Amsterdam.

Both had absorbed the loose, quick brushwork of Frans Hals, the Haarlem master of the informal portrait, and both painted 'merry companies', music-making, card games and tavern rooms full of laughter and small disorder. Molenaer pushed his scenes toward broad comedy and theatre, foreshadowing the crowded storytelling interiors Jan Steen would make famous a generation later.

One of his best-known canvases is a double portrait thought to show himself and Leyster at the start of their marriage, surrounded by the props of their trade.