991 - Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den

Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den Amsterdam 1621 - (vor) 1674 57 x 66 cm Company in a Room. Bavarian private collection. Lit.: Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau 1994, vol. VI, no. 2272 with plate on p. 3860. According to the eighteenth century art historian, Arnold Houbraken, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout was a 'great friend', as well as a pupil of Rembrandt and painted in the style of his master throughout his career. While this was certainly true of his Biblical subjects, Eeckhout was a highly gifted and imaginative artist who displayed enough versatility to also follow other ground-breaking trends in painting at the time. Thus he was also an innovator in the type of interior genre scenes that were being produced by Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch in the 1650s and anticipated Dutch genre painting of the 1660s and 1670s, employing his own personal manner to reveal a more naturalistic depiction of elegant society at play than might be said of his predecessors in this genre, such as Willem Buytewech and Dirck Hals.