ABSTRACT
Jacob Campo Weyerman initially trained as a flower painter and had some success as a professional artist, but he also had a talent for writing, sometimes in a satirical mode. Weyerman was keenly aware of the popularity of Arnold Houbraken’s bio-history of Netherlandish painting published just eight years earlier and hoped to derive his own success by means of supposedly superior biographical narratives, as well as selling the publication for less. Seymour Slive and Peter Hecht are more even-handed in their evaluations; although both scholars criticize Weyerman’s excessive dependence on Houbraken, they also acknowledge that new facts were incorporated in De levens-beschryvingen. Weyerman, who like Houbraken acknowledges female artists in the title of his publication, similarly includes just twenty-four women artists within the compendium, with only nine of these being the subjects of distinct life stories.
