The J. Paul Getty Museum

Popular and prolific, David Vinckboons trained with his painter father, who brought the family to Holland to escape religious persecution in Flanders. Despite having ten children, Vinckboons's life appears relatively uneventful. He stayed in Amsterdam, where his family had settled years before, and he must have died before January 1633, when his widow appeared before Amsterdam's orphan committee. Vinckboons helped to introduce the Flemish tradition of genre painting to Holland. He modeled his forest scenes on Gillis van Coninxloo's wooded views and, inspired by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, painted biblical episodes with high horizons and multitudes of bright figures in fantastic meadow landscapes. He depicted "peasant sorrows," portraying the tense relationship between the local people and the Spanish soldiers during the Netherlandish revolt.

In his last years, he made close-up views of a single couple in a landscape and pure landscapes of woods and heroic trees. His paintings of fashionably attired groups entertaining themselves by eating, drinking, and flirting in country-house landscapes directly influenced later artists. Many engravers made Vinckboons's drawings into prints--more than those of any of his Dutch contemporaries--prolonging his influence into the next generation.