Pieter van Anraedt

In 1675 Pieter van Anraedt signed and dated a large group portrait of the six governors of the Oudezijds Huiszittenhuis in Amsterdam, the charity that handed out food and peat to the city's poor, together with their housemaster. The first governor on the left is Ferdinand Bol, once a pupil of Rembrandt and by then a wealthy man who had given up painting. More than 40 years later the biographer Arnold Houbraken praised the picture and credited it to Bol himself, even though Van Anraedt's signature is on the canvas. It now hangs in the Rijksmuseum.

Van Anraedt was born in Utrecht around 1635 and formed his style in Deventer, where the portraits of Gerard ter Borch, the town's leading painter, left a clear mark on him. He worked mostly as a portraitist, spent the early 1670s in Amsterdam and then went back to Deventer, where he was buried on 13 April 1678.