Dutch, 1621 - 1649
Isack van Ostade, the youngest of the eight children of Jan Hendricx van Eyndhoven and Janneke Hendriksdr., was born in Haarlem, and baptized on June 2, 1621. He became a member of the Haarlem painters' guild in 1643, and died in 1649, at the age of twenty-eight.
Ostade's first surviving dated painting is from 1639, ten years before his early death. Although his career was very short, his output was prodigious and his creativity and originality striking. According to Houbraken (see person bibliography), Isack was a pupil of his more famous brother Adriaen van Ostade, and his early paintings of low-life interiors and peasant scenes are indeed extremely close in style to the work of his brother.
It was not long, however, before Isack began to develop his own distinctive artistic personality, and started to paint larger outdoor peasant and village scenes in which elements of genre scenes are combined with an evocative treatment of their landscape settings. These compositions typically show travelers or peasants resting in front of inns or houses. [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]