Das Forum Romanum in Rom

Jacob van der Ulft was born in Gorinchem in 1627 and died in 1689. A glass painter by training, he also designed buildings and held office in his native town, becoming its burgomaster, and he made paintings, drawings and prints of Italian cities and antiquities without, so far as is known, ever travelling south: he built his Roman views out of the drawings and prints of artists who had been there, a practice common among the Dutch painters of his generation who stayed at home. This panel is dated 1671 and is catalogued in Berlin as inventory 908A; it reached the collection in 1874, when the museum bought the cabinet of the banker Barthold Suermondt, whose paintings later formed the core of the collection in Aachen that still bears his name. Van der Ulft is a new artist to this gallery. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.