Willem Bartel van der Kooi

A girl at the piano has turned round on her stool because two small boys have burst in on her practice. Willem Bartel van der Kooi painted the scene in 1813 on a canvas nearly one and a half metres tall and signed it in Latin as both invented and painted by him. It looks like a snapshot, yet the three children are carefully arranged in a triangle. Nobody knows who they were, or whether the picture is a portrait at all.

His own start was humble. Born in 1768 in Augustinusga, a village in Friesland, he was apprenticed at 12 to local house painters and then to a decorator in Leeuwarden, the Frisian capital, where he also took drawing lessons. In 1798 he became drawing master at the University of Franeker, Friesland's own university, and kept the post until the French authorities closed it in 1811. In 1804 he travelled to Düsseldorf to copy paintings in the Elector's picture gallery.

Recognition came in 1808, when Louis Napoleon, then King of Holland, held a national art competition and Van der Kooi's genre scene The Love Letter took first prize. Settled in Leeuwarden from 1813, he painted King Willem I and his queen from life in 1818 and taught drawing in the town until his death in 1836. The Rijksmuseum received Piano Practice Interrupted in 1869 as a gift from H. van der Kooi of Leeuwarden.