Man Looking through a Window

genre

Samuel van Hoogstraten was active as a painter in several different genres, and also an engraver and writer. In his treatise of 1678 he explained the importance of illusionism in painting and the need for perspective in the fine arts. He himself frequently practiced these skills and became one of the most important seventeenth-century creators of trompe-l'oeil paintings and perspective boxes.

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About the Artist

Samuel van Hoogstraten

1627 – 1678

Dutch painter and writer on art. He painted genre scenes in the style of de Hooch and Metsu, and portraits, but he is best known as a specialist in perspective effects. One of his "perspective boxes" which shows a painted toy world through a peep-hole, is in the National Gallery, London. Only in his early works can it be detected that he was a pupil of Rembrandt. Hoogstraten travelled to London, Vienna, and Rome, worked in Amsterdam and The Hague as well as his native Dordrecht, and was a man of many parts. He was an etcher, poet, director of the mint at Dordrecht, and art theorist. His Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the Art of Painting, 1678) contains one of the rare contemporary appraisals of Rembrandt's work.

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