Ludolf de Jongh

Ludolf de Jongh had two careers at once. In 1650s Rotterdam he was the leading genre painter, and he was also an officer in the town's civic guard and later the schout, roughly the sheriff, of the nearby village of Hillegersberg.

His training had been unusually broad. He studied with the versatile Cornelis Saftleven, then with the portraitist Anthonie Palamedesz in Delft, and finally in Utrecht with Jan van Bijlert, a painter steeped in the dramatic light of Caravaggio. Out of that mix De Jongh became a fashionable portraitist and, above all, a painter of elegant company in sunlit courtyards and gardens.

Those courtyard scenes matter beyond his own name. They closely resemble the famous interiors and yards of Pieter de Hooch, the Delft master of quiet domestic light, and De Jongh seems to have got there first, since his Rotterdam work of the 1650s helped shape the kind of picture De Hooch would make his own.