Nicola van Houbraken

Nicola van Houbraken was an Italian still-life painter who carried a Flemish name and a Flemish trade. He was born in Messina in 1663 to a Flemish father and a Sicilian mother, into a family of painters and picture dealers that reached back through his father Ettore to his grandfather Joannes in the Netherlands.

When Messina rose against its Spanish rulers in the 1670s, the family left the island for Livorno, the busy Tuscan port, and it was in Tuscany that Nicola made his name. He specialised in lavish arrangements of fruit, flowers, game and animals, set indoors or among trees and painted with a northern eye for texture and sheen. The Medici, Florence's ruling house, collected his canvases. He went on working into the eighteenth century and died in 1723.