Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem

For most of the 17th century, wealthy Dutch collectors wanted Italy on their walls, and Nicolaes Berchem gave it to them by the hundreds. Warm southern light, shepherds driving cattle down a dusty track, ruins on a golden hillside. It is the dream of a Mediterranean afternoon, painted in the flat, grey-skied Dutch Republic.

The strange part is that no document shows Berchem ever saw it. Many of his Haarlem colleagues made the long journey over the Alps to Rome, and scholars still disagree on whether he did the same around 1651 to 1653. His Italy may well have come from other painters' sketches, from prints, and from his own imagination. He trained first under his father, the still-life painter Pieter Claesz, joined the Haarlem painters' guild in 1642, and then worked at a pace few could match.

He left an enormous body of work, several hundred paintings along with around 80 etchings and hundreds of drawings, and he taught a long line of pupils who carried the sunlit style into the next generation. Collectors a century after his death still paid more for a Berchem pasture than for many a scene by painters who had actually stood in the countryside around Rome.