Portrait of Frans Greenwood, Miniaturist, Glass Engraver and Poet in Dordrecht

The man in this oval taught the painter his other craft. Frans Greenwood, born in Rotterdam in 1680, earned his living as a tax official and wrote occasional verse, much of it for weddings, but his lasting mark was made on glass. He developed stippling, building up a picture on a wine glass from tiny dots struck with a diamond point, and he passed the difficult technique on to Aert Schouman.

Schouman painted him in shades of grey on a copper oval only 11 centimetres high, a size explained by where it was going. Early in the 18th century the Amsterdam painter Arnoud van Halen began collecting small portraits of Dutch poets, and the cabinet that held them became known as the Panpoeticon Batavûm, all the poets of the Dutch. After Van Halen's death in 1732 the collector Michiel de Roode bought it and kept adding faces. On the back of this oval someone wrote Greenwood's birth date and, below it, 30 April 1740.