Samuel van Hoogstraten

Samuel van Hoogstraten came to Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio as a teenager, after his father's death, and trained alongside Carel Fabritius, the gifted pupil later killed in the Delft gunpowder explosion. He absorbed Rembrandt's handling of light, then spent his life chasing a different thrill, the fooling of the eye.

In Vienna he showed the Emperor Ferdinand III a trompe-l'oeil of everyday objects so convincing that the emperor kept it and handed the painter a gold medal. His most ingenious survivor is a perspective box now in London: a wooden cabinet you peer into through a hole in the side, where a flat painted Dutch house springs open into deep, walkable rooms. Only a handful of these boxes still exist.

Late in life he wrote it all down. His 1678 treatise, an 'Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting', laid out the craft in the terms Rembrandt's world actually used, and became one of the richest sources we have on how the Dutch Golden Age thought about pictures.