Nicolaas Verkolje

Nicolaas Verkolje learned two crafts from his father in Delft. Jan Verkolje, a portrait painter, taught him to paint, and also to make mezzotints, prints whose image is scraped and burnished out of a roughened copper plate so that it comes out in soft tones from deep black to light. Jan died in 1693, when his son was 20 and already nearly trained.

In 1700 Nicolaas moved to Amsterdam and stayed there for the rest of his life. He painted portraits, genre scenes and, above all, polished history pieces in the classicising taste of the day, and he kept making mezzotints. Several Amsterdam painters of the next generation trained with him, among them the portraitist Jan Maurits Quinkhard. He died in Amsterdam in 1746, and his widow then moved to Leiderdorp, near Leiden, with their daughter Johanna Antonia.