Jurriaan Andriessen

Between 1805 and 1808 someone in the Andriessen household on the Amstel in Amsterdam kept a diary in pictures, around 700 drawings of family, friends, street life and the politics of the day. When the sheets were scattered at an auction in 1903, they went under the name of Jurriaan Andriessen, the best-known painter in the family. In 1964 the Amsterdam archivist Isabella van Eeghen showed that they were the work of his son Christiaan. The father still appears in them, in one sheet looking over a drawing like a connoisseur.

Jurriaan's own path began at 12, as an apprentice to the decorative painter Anthony Elliger. At 16 he spent a year with the portraitist Jan Maurits Quinkhard, and in 1766 he won first prize at Amsterdam's city drawing academy. One of his early large commissions was for Huis te Manpad, a country house near Haarlem, where a hall is still lined with his painted hangings. Their restoration began in 2023.

He also taught. Among those who learned from him were Wouter Johannes van Troostwijk, a landscape painter who died young in 1810, and Christiaan himself. Jurriaan Andriessen died in 1819 and was buried in the Old Lutheran Church in Amsterdam.