Philip van Dijk

In 1733 the paintings of Adriaan Bout, a Hague collector, went up for sale, and Philip van Dijk paid 430 guilders for a small Rembrandt of 1631, Simeon's Song of Praise, the old man in the Temple holding the infant Christ. The picture went to Prince William IV of Orange, then stadholder of Friesland, and it hangs today in the Mauritshuis. Van Dijk earned his living as a painter, yet purchases like this one are why his name keeps turning up in the Orange collection records.

He was born in 1683 in Oud-Beijerland, a village south of Rotterdam, and trained under two masters of smooth, highly finished painting, Arnold Boonen in Amsterdam and Adriaen van der Werff in Rotterdam. He set up in Middelburg in Zeeland in 1708 and, being close to Flanders, went to Antwerp to buy older Dutch pictures for resale. From 1718 he worked in The Hague, where the Dutch elite came to him for their portraits.

The Orange family became his most faithful clients. He painted William IV as a boy with his mother, Maria Louise of Hesse-Kassel, and his sister, and again in 1729 when the prince came of age. In the mid-1720s he also went to Kassel as court painter to the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, his patron's mother's family. Letters he wrote to William IV about buying and restoring paintings survive, and in 1750 he was named the prince's court painter, a year before William died. Van Dijk died in The Hague in 1753.