Pieter van den Bosch
1613 · Dutch
The story
He is a painter we can barely pin down. In October 1650 a man in Amsterdam gave his age as 37, which is almost all we have to place his birth around 1613. Pieter van den Bosch painted quiet domestic interiors, a maid scouring a pot or a cook at the washing-up in a dim kitchen, the kind of scene a prosperous household hung in the parlour as a reminder of the virtue of honest work.
The doubt reaches the pictures themselves. The National Gallery in London labels one of its kitchen scenes only as possibly by him, because so little survives to compare it against. In December 1663 he left Amsterdam for London, and there the trail goes cold. He was dead by 1683, though no one wrote down when.
