Carel Beschey

His younger brothers were Jacob Andries, a history painter, and Jan Frans, a copyist and art dealer.

[6] Thanks to the connections of his younger brother Balthasar who was also an art dealer and portrait painter, Carel Beschey was able to find patrons and buyers for his paintings.

At his brother's house, art lovers regularly met up to study the work of the great Dutch and Flemish masters.

What these artists had in common was that they liked to paint pleasant landscapes with peasant scenes in fresh colours, which exuded a bucolic sense of happiness.

An example is A winter landscape with hunters and skaters on a frozen river running through a village (sold at Sotheby's on 9 December 2009 in London, lot 5).