Biography
Attempts to distinguish the work of the elder and younger Heemskerck, where they overlap, have as yet been unsuccessful. An even older Egbert van Heemskerk, often reported to have lived from 1610-1680, may not have existed. Egbert van Heemskerck the Younger was born between 1666 and 1686 and died in 1744, the locations apparently unknown, but he worked in London for John Wilmor, Earl of Rochester in 1670.
Egbert Jaspersz van Heemskerck or Egbert van Heemskerck the Elder (1634–1704) was born in Haarlem to the doctor Jasper Jaspersz van Heemskerck and his wife Marytge Jansdr van Stralen. After his father's death, his mother Marytge married the art dealer Jan Wijnants in 1651. This art dealer was the father of the landscape painter Jan Wijnants, making Jan and Egbert stepbrothers. He became a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1646 and has been reported to be a student of Pieter de Grebber. Though listed in 1646, he may have become a member in 1664 (a year suspiciously lacking member registrations), like other members mistakenly registered in 1646, such as Evert Collier and Evert Oudendijck.
In Haarlem in 1663 he declared himself to be 28, and in 1665, he declared himself to be 31 years old. In the early 1680s he moved to London, where one of his often satirical paintings apparently landed him in serious trouble with King Charles II of England. Though he is registered as having died in London in 1704, he was listed by Laurens van der Vinne as one of the painters who had predeceased his father in 1702.
Various paintings are exhibited in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai, the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Read more about this topic: Egbert Van Heemskerck
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)