Simon van der Does

Most of what is known about Simon van der Does comes by way of one of his pupils. Johan van Gool, a Hague painter who later wrote lives of Dutch artists himself, passed the story to Arnold Houbraken, the biographer of Dutch painters, and it is not a happy one.

Simon was born in The Hague in 1653 and learned to paint from his father, Jacob van der Does, who specialised in Italianate landscapes with sheep and goats. The son kept to that manner all his life. As a young man he worked in Friesland and spent a year in England, and he could also paint portraits in the smooth style of Caspar Netscher, the fashionable Hague portraitist. According to Houbraken, his marriage kept him in debt, and after the deaths of his father and his wife he was so low that he could not paint and spent three years in the city's charity hospital. He then lived in Brussels for a year and moved on to Antwerp, where he worked for picture dealers, the cut-throats, as Houbraken called them. He was still alive there after 1718.