An Artist in his Studio, Painting the Portrait of a Lady

Ludolf Bakhuysen was the foremost marine painter of the later Dutch Golden Age — the artist Amsterdam turned to once Willem van de Velde the Elder and the Younger had left for England in 1672 — and he was famous for hiring open boats in order to watch storms at first hand. Born at Emden in East Frisia, he came to Amsterdam about 1650 as a merchant’s clerk and turned to painting only in the later 1650s, studying first under Allart van Everdingen and then under Hendrik Dubbels. The sea supplied nearly all of his large output, but late in life he tried his hand at a few other subjects, and this interior of 1707, in which a painter works at the portrait of a standing woman, belongs to that small group of studio and genre scenes. Bakhuysen was a public figure in his day, received Cosimo III de’ Medici and Peter the Great, and in 1699 opened a gallery in the Amsterdam town hall. The painting is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.