Gerard Dou

Gerrit Dou was Rembrandt’s first pupil.

Dou envisaged his paintings to be a consummate imitation of reality. He succeeded gloriously in doing this.

Dou’s paintings were so popular among collectors that he quickly became one of the top-earning artists in all of Europe. Collectors paid vast sums for the right of first refusal of his most recently completed works.

The secret behind the extraordinary precision of Dou’s little paintings is his stupendous dedication. He left nothing to chance and even made his own paints and brushes.

Dou’s great strength lies in the convincing rendering of all kinds of light; sunlight as well as artificial light. The technical virtuosity of Dou’s candlelight scenes was unequalled.

Dou had many followers, and his students remained true to his style. He thus became the patriarch of an entire school of ‘fine painters’, many of whom worked in his hometown Leiden, where his emulators continued to paint in his manner well into the 18th century.

Dou was able to perfectly imitate the most diverse materials, from fur and glass to the plumage of a bird or the wrinkled skin of an old woman.

Dou worked extremely slowly. At the beginning of his career he also painted portraits. But his sitters had to pose for so long that they became irritable. He eventually stopped taking on portrait commissions.

Dou’s patron Johan de Bye exhibited his collection of no less than 29 paintings by Dou, including this The Night School, on Breestraat in Leiden in 1665. This probably made Dou the only 17th-century artist to whom a temporary museum was dedicated.

Many of Dou’s paintings were originally kept as veritable treasures in cabinets with painted doors. In the 17th century, costly paintings were often also protected with a curtain, like the one we see here. However, the frame and curtain are not real, but painted.