1596/1597 -1667 · Amsterdam and portrait of the golden age

Measured interiors, natural gestures and social precision make Thomas de Keyser one of the great portrait painters of Amsterdam before Rembrandt.

Thomas de Keyser was born in Amsterdam in 1596 or 1597 and died there in 1667. He was the son of Hendrick de Keyser, a major architect and sculptor in the United Provinces, from whom he received training as an architect in the guild of tailors of stone. His pictorial learning remained uncertain, but his first dated paintings appeared in 1622. Between 1625 and 1635, he became one of the most sought-after portraitists in Amsterdam. He adapted group portraiture to the relatively modest dimensions of bourgeois interiors and knew how to represent merchants, regents, families and officers with an elegance without stiffness. A musician and his daughter combines identity, filiation and domestic culture with through instruments and the dialogue of gestures. In the Portrait of a Man Sitting Near a Table, Furniture, Papers and Measured Pose define a precise social presence without stifling the individual. De Keyser excels in the accords of black, brown, gray and white, animated by light on a face, a collar or an object. Rembrandt's rise reduced his pictorial commissions from the 1630s. He then devoted himself more to the stone trade and architecture, then resumed painting more regularly around 1660. Having become master mason of the city, he participated in the completion of the dome of the new Town Hall. His known work of around a hundred paintings united thus portrait, architectural space and civic culture of Amsterdam. The "Thomas de Keyser" selection notably compares A Musician and His Daughter and Portrait of a Man Sitting Near a Table. His reading favors atmosphere.

De Keyser holds an entire society together in an interior: the gesture, the furniture and the light reveal the rank without erasing the person.