Pieter Isaacsz

Between 1620 and 1625 the court painter of King Christian IV of Denmark wrote 58 secret reports for Sweden, Denmark's great rival in the north. Pieter Isaacsz addressed them to Axel Oxenstierna, the Swedish chancellor, and hid them among ordinary letters on a postal route through Hamburg. They dealt with Danish military building plans and the visits of foreign diplomats. The Swedes paid him 400 riksdaler a year, and Oxenstierna suggested that Isaacsz send him a painting from time to time, so the money could pass as the price of pictures. Christian IV never found out.

Isaacsz was born in 1568 or 1569 in Helsingør, the Danish port on the Sound, where his father, an Amsterdam merchant, acted as an agent for the Danish king. He trained in Amsterdam under the painter Cornelis Ketel and spent time in Venice and Rome with the German painter Hans von Aachen. By the end of the 1580s he was painting portraits and militia companies in Amsterdam, and the young Hendrick Avercamp, later known for his skating scenes, was among his pupils.

In 1614 he settled in Denmark for good, and the next year Christian IV made him royal painter. Isaacsz painted the king's portraits, coordinated the painted ceilings of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen and ordered 23 small biblical scenes on copper from Dutch painters for the king's private chapel at Frederiksborg. From 1617 he was also an inspector of the Sound toll, the fee every passing ship paid at Helsingør, and he died there of the plague in September 1625.