Aert (c1603-1677) was a Dutch landscape painter who specialism was night scenes. His particular skillset was in depicting moonlight and fires in winter landscapes around waterbodies.
Van der Neer was born in Gorinchem. He worked as a steward to the lords of Arkel early on in life. He became an amateur painter possibly upon contact with the Amsterdam painters Rafael and Joachim Govertsz Camphuysen, whose sister Lysbeth he married in 1629. They had six children: Grietje (1629), Eglon (~1635), Cornelia (1642), Elisabeth (1645), Pieter (1648), and Alida (1650). He also knew Aelbert Cuyp and Meindert Hobbema.
His first paintings were sold around 1639.
His Winter Landscape (1643), and the Moonlight Scene (1644) were highly regarded after his death.
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His 1652 witness to a city hall fire birthed a few more paintings. It seems he was well acquainted with the canals and woods about Haarlem and Leiden, and with the reaches of the Meuse and Rhine. Dordrecht, the home of Aelbert Cuyp, is sometimes found in his pictures, and substantial evidence exists that there was friendship between the two men.
Paintings by he and Cuyp has represented either the frozen Maes with fishermen packing herrings, or the moon reflecting its light on the river waters. These are models after which Van Der Neer appears to have worked. He carefully enlivened his friend's pictures, when asked to do so, with figures and cattle. Van Der Neer's favourite subjects were the rivers and watercourses of his native country either at sunset or after dark, realizing translucence which allows objects even distant to appear in the darkness with varieties of warm brown and steel greys, and to paint frozen water, and his daylight icescapes with golfers, sleighers, and fishermen are as numerous as his moonlights.
In the National Gallery, London picture Cuyp signs his name on the pail of a milkmaid, whose figure and red skirt he has painted with light effectiveness near the edge of Van Der Neer's landscape. Lysbeth and he lived in Kalverstraat during that time, but because Lysbeth had birthed 5 mouths, he opened a wine tavern by 1659, going bankrupt in 1661.
And then he died. Eglon became a painter after that, presumably taught by Lysbeth. Aerts largest of about one hundred and fifty pictures accessible to the public, are in the Hermitage at Saint Petersburg. In England they are at the National Gallery and Wallace Collection.
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