Joachim von Sandrart the Elder

Much of what we know about German painters of the 1600s we know because Joachim von Sandrart wrote it down. Born in Frankfurt in 1606, he trained as an engraver in Prague and learned painting in Utrecht under Gerard van Honthorst, a Dutch master of candlelit scenes, then worked in Amsterdam through the years Rembrandt was making his name there.

In old age he turned author. His 'Teutsche Academie', published in Nuremberg from 1675, was the first history of art written in German: part survey of ancient and modern art, part biographical dictionary, with engraved portraits of the artists. He leaned on earlier writers for the foreign lives, but for the German-born painters he had met on his travels he wrote fresh accounts, and those pages remain a main source for the period. In 1662 he had helped found the drawing academy in Nuremberg, one of the earliest art schools in the German lands, so that the training he described in his book had somewhere to happen.