Eglon van der Neer

Eglon van der Neer was a Dutch Golden Age painter, the son of the moonlight landscapist Aert van der Neer, who made his career not with landscapes but with small, polished pictures of fashionable people in silk. His Judith (around 1678) belongs to the National Gallery in London.

Life in brief

Born in Amsterdam around 1635–36, Eglon trained first with his father and then with the figure painter Jacob van Loo. In the mid-1650s he went to France, where he worked in the household of a Dutch nobleman, before returning to the Netherlands and settling in Rotterdam. Later he worked in Brussels, and from 1690 he was court painter to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1703. His pupils included Adriaen van der Werff, who became one of the most expensive Dutch painters of the next generation.

Style

Van der Neer belongs to the "fine painters" (fijnschilders) of the later seventeenth century, who worked on a small scale with invisible brushstrokes and extraordinary attention to materials. His women wear satin that shines like metal, and he took obvious pleasure in pearls, lace, Turkish carpets and polished floors. He painted genre interiors in the manner of Gerard ter Borch and Frans van Mieris, portraits, and, late in life, small landscapes.

Judith

Judith is a small oil on panel showing the biblical heroine who saved her city by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Van der Neer turns the story into a portrait-like costume piece: a young woman in silk and pearls poses with the sword while her maid drops the general's head into a bag. Look at the contrast between the calm face and the grisly bundle at the edge of the picture, which is typical of how Dutch painters of the period softened violent subjects for collectors. Compare Fede Galizia's Judith with the Head of Holofernes and the many biblical women in Baroque Art.

Where to see his work

The National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the museums of Munich and Düsseldorf hold examples.