Jan Dirksz. Both (1615/18-1652)Jan Both was born in Utrecht in 1618. From 1634 to 1637 he was taught by the painter Gerard van Honthorst. Like his brother and fellow artist Andries Both he worked for a period in Rome. There he met the Frenchman Claude Lorrain, with whom he collaborated on a series of landscape paintings. The everyday life of the streets of Rome became a favourite theme in his works. On his return to Utrecht (probably in 1642) he stopped producing genre pieces and focused instead on pictures of Italian landscapes bathed in a warm, golden light. This was a theme several other Dutch painters had also adopted: they were known as the Italianates. |
