Johannes Lingelbach

Johannes Lingelbach was born in Frankfurt in 1622, the son of a German innkeeper who moved the family to Amsterdam when the boy was 14. Like many ambitious young painters he made the long journey south, spending years in Rome around 1650, where he joined the Dutch and Flemish artists in the city known as the Bentvueghels.

There he took up the bambocciate, small lively scenes of ordinary Roman street life, of markets, taverns and harbours, in the manner of the painter Pieter van Laer. He brought that Italian sunlight and bustle home to Amsterdam and made a career of it.

Lingelbach had a second, quieter trade too. He was so skilled at figures and animals that established landscape painters, among them Meindert Hobbema, would leave gaps in their pictures for him to fill with the people and horses that bring a scene to life.