Johan Bernard Scheffer
1765–1809 · Holy Roman Empire, Dutch Republic · Neoclassicism
The story
In 1808 Louis Napoleon, whom his brother Napoleon had made King of Holland, appointed Johan Bernard Scheffer his court painter in Amsterdam. Scheffer painted the king's portrait, but he held the post for only a year. In July 1809 he was buried in the Zuiderkerk, the first church built in Amsterdam for Protestant worship. He was in his mid-forties.
Scheffer came from Hesse in Germany and trained with the portraitist Johann Friedrich August Tischbein before moving to the Dutch Republic. From 1788 he worked in Utrecht, then in Dordrecht, where in 1794 he married the miniature painter Cornelia Lamme. The family moved on to The Hague, to Rotterdam and, in 1803, to Amsterdam. He painted portraits, domestic scenes and a few large history pictures. His portrait of Leonardus van der Voort, a deputy in the first parliament of the new Batavian Republic, hangs in the Rijksmuseum.
His death left Cornelia short of money. In 1811 she moved to Paris with their eldest son, Ary, then 16 and later a well-known Romantic painter in France, and the two younger sons joined them a year later.
