Pieter Merkelbach

Very little survives about Pieter Merkelbach beyond the outline of a short life. He was born around 1633 in Rotterdam, the busy Dutch port where a rising merchant class kept portrait painters steadily in work, and he made his living as one of them.

What anchors his name is a single group portrait from 1660, a Rotterdam family posed together in their own interior, the kind of picture a prosperous household ordered to fix itself in paint. He died in his home city at the end of 1673, only about 40 years old, leaving a wife and three young children.