Art by Abraham van den Tempel

Van den Tempel was a Dutch Golden Age portraitist, born around 1622 in Leeuwarden, who spent most of his working life in Amsterdam painting the city's wealthy merchant class exactly the way they wanted to be seen: in extravagant silk and satin, sometimes dressed up as figures from mythology or pastoral scenes, a fashionable convention of the period that let sitters flatter themselves while technically staying modest. He trained under Jacob Backer and built a solid, comfortable career on portraits rather than the more ambitious history painting most of his peers chased, work that's less famous today than Rembrandt's or Hals's but was, in its time, exactly what Amsterdam's elite wanted hanging in their homes.