Willem Uppink

Willem Uppink belonged to the last generation of Dutch painters who kept the old 17th-century manner alive before Romanticism took hold. Born in Amsterdam in 1767, he painted calm rural scenes peopled with figures and animals, cattle beside a cottage or a horse-drawn cart on a country road, the orderly countryside Dutch collectors had loved for two centuries.

Little of his life is recorded. He worked into old age and died in 1849 at 81, and today his pictures surface mainly at auction, where a single landscape can still change hands for several thousand euros.