Willem Drost

One of the most gifted painters to come out of Rembrandt's studio is also one we know almost nothing about. Willem Drost was baptised in Amsterdam in 1633 and buried in Venice in 1659, dead at 26, and between those two dates the record is thin.

He trained with Rembrandt in Amsterdam, probably around 1650, close enough to absorb the older man's warm light and heavy paint. In 1654 he painted a Bathsheba, the biblical woman holding King David's letter, the same year Rembrandt painted his own famous version of her. Both now hang in the Louvre in Paris, a few rooms apart, and Drost's holds its own beside the master's.

Then he left for Italy and never came back, spending his last years in Rome and Venice, where the colour of Titian, the great Venetian, worked its way into his painting. So few pictures can be firmly given to him that scholars have spent generations untangling his hand from Rembrandt's own.