Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt

By the early 1600s, if you were a Dutch prince, a diplomat or a wealthy regent and wanted your face recorded, the man to see was Michiel van Mierevelt in Delft. He turned out portraits in such numbers, with a workshop of assistants copying the best ones, that people counted his output in the thousands.

In 1607 he was made court painter to the Prince of Orange, and he painted the leading figures of the young Dutch Republic while it fought its long war of independence from Spain, William the Silent, his sons Maurice and Frederick Henry, and a stream of foreign envoys passing through The Hague. His portraits are sober and exact, plain dark clothes and sharply observed ruffs, the visual record of a new merchant state that distrusted display.

The poet and statesman Constantijn Huygens, who knew everyone worth knowing, simply called him the leader in his field. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam now holds the fullest set of those Orange family faces.