Mattheus Terwesten

In Rome in the late 1690s, the Bentvueghels, a fellowship of Dutch and Flemish artists living in the city, gave Mattheus Terwesten his society name, Arend, the eagle. He had come south from The Hague by way of Berlin, where his elder brother Augustinus worked for the Brandenburg court, and in Rome he filled an album with drawings after ancient sculpture.

Those studies fed everything he did afterwards. Back in The Hague from 1699, Terwesten became the painter the city's wealthy families called on to finish a room, with ceilings and overdoors full of classical gods and allegorical figures fitted into the panelling. He also directed the Hague drawing academy, where young artists learned to draw from casts and the model. He kept working into old age and died in The Hague in 1757, aged 87, after two strokes.