Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech

Willem Buytewech had only a short working life, yet he helped give Dutch painting one of its most recognizable early subjects: fashionable young people eating, drinking, flirting and showing off. He joined the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke in 1612, when artists such as Frans Hals were also reshaping pictures of contemporary life. Buytewech knew Hals's work closely enough to copy a figure from one of his paintings in a drawing. A few years later he returned to Rotterdam, bought a house there in 1618 and remained in the city until his death in 1624. His elegant companies are useful documents of manners and dress, but they also belong to a new kind of art in which ordinary social behavior became worthy of serious pictorial attention.