Jan van Nickelen

Jan van Nickelen ended his career at a German court, painting screens. He was born in Haarlem in the mid-1650s, the son of Isaak van Nickelen, a painter of church interiors, who taught him perspective and sent him to school to learn Latin and French. In 1688 he joined the Haarlem painters' guild, and his own pictures ranged from landscapes and country houses to views of buildings.

He was an inventor on the side. The early biographers credit him with a new hard varnish and with improvements in cloth-making that he never had the money to exploit. What brought him to court was a speciality called chassinets, painted silk screens used to decorate rooms and as backdrops for shadow plays. They pleased Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, a great collector who held court at Düsseldorf, and in 1712 van Nickelen moved there to paint screens showing the elector's properties.

When Johann Wilhelm died in 1716, van Nickelen went on to Kassel to decorate a residence for the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and he died there in 1721 with that work still unfinished.