Eglon van der Neer

Training under Jacob van Loo is recorded. The recorded working language is Dutch. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are landscape, portrait and history. Positions recorded include court painter. Works named in the authority record are Interior with a Woman Washing her Hands, Tobias and the Angel, Portrait of a young woman and A Woman Playing the Bandora. Work by Eglon van der Neer is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Nationalmuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and Uffizi Gallery.

Van der Neer was born in Amsterdam and likely first taught by his father, Aert van der Neer,. Eglon had a least five brothers and sisters, who were baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk between 1640 and 1650. He took lessons from Jacob van Loo, who was then one of the foremost figure painters in Amsterdam. Around 1654, Van der Neer, who probably had just finished his education with van Loo, traveled to Orange, Vaucluse in the south of France and entered the service of Frederick, Burgrave of Dohna, governor of the Principality of Orange. Van der Neer stayed for three or four years in Orange and returned to Amsterdam by the end of 1658. There he married Maria Wagensvelt, the daughter of a wealthy Rotterdam notary. In 1663, van der Neer and his family moved to Rotterdam, where Adriaen van der Werff became his student. He stayed in Rotterdam until his wife died in 1677. In 1679, he moved to The Hague. In 1680 he became a member of the Confrerie Pictura there. Later that year he moved again, taking up his residence at Brussels, where he married the miniature painter Marie Du Chastel in the following year. They had nine children.

In Brussels, van der Neer established a good relationship with the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Marquess of Castanaga. In 1687, van der Neer was appointed court painter to the Spanish King Charles II of Spain. In 1689, when Carlos' first wife died, van der Neer portrayed one of the new wedding candidates, Maria Anna of Neuburg. In 1695, Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, bought a painting by van der Neer, when traveling through the Netherlands. This painting must have pleased him, because shortly thereafter the Elector Palatine contacted van der Neer directly and gave him commissions. In that same year Brussels was bombarded by French troops and van der Neer started to look for another place to begin a new life. The Elector Palatine had been looking for a replacement ever since his last court painter Johannes Spilberg had died in 1690. Van der Neer's second wife had died in 1692, and he met Spilberg's daughter, herself a qualified painter, Adriana Spilberg. They married in 1697 and in 1698 Johann Wilhelm offered Van der Neer the position at his court as head painter. Van der Neer thus settled in Düsseldorf and remained there for these last years of his life.