Samuel van Hoogstraten

Training under Rembrandt is recorded. The recorded working language is Dutch. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Works named in the authority record are View of an Interior. Work by Samuel van Hoogstraten is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Städel Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nationalmuseum and National Gallery of Canada.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten trained first with his father Dirk van Hoogstraten and stayed in Dordrecht until about 1640. On the death of his father, he moved to Amsterdam where he entered the workshop of Rembrandt. A short time later, he started out on his own as a master and painter of portraits. He later made several travels which took him (1651) to Vienna, Rome and London, finally retiring to Dordrecht. There he married in 1656, and held an appointment as provost of the mint.

Van Hoogstraten's fame derives from his versatile career as a painter, poet and zealous social climber. Besides painting and directing a mint, he devoted some of his time to literary labours. His magnum opus is a book on painting, the Introduction to the Academy of Painting, or the Visible World (original title: 'Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt', Rotterdam, 1678) which is in length and theoretical scope one of the most ambitious treatises on the art of painting published in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. It covers issues such as pictorial persuasion and illusionism, the painter's moral standards and the relation of painting to philosophy, referring to various ancient and modern authors. While reacting to international, mainly Southern European ideas on painting which Van Hoogstraten may have encountered during his travels, the treatise also reflects contemporary talk and thought on art from Dutch studios. He wrote it as a sequel to Karel van Mander's early-17th-century book on painting and painters entitled Het Schilder-Boeck. One of van Hoogstraten's many students, Arnold Houbraken, later wrote the book entitled The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters, which included a biography of his teacher. This biography is the basis of most of the information that we have about van Hoogstraten today.

Van Hoogstraten also composed sonnets and tragedies. We are indebted to him for some of the familiar sayings of Rembrandt.