DOUW, Gerhard, a celebrated painter, was born at Leyden in 1613, and received his first instruction in drawing and design from Bartholomew Dolendo, an engraver, and also from Peter Kouwhoorn, a painter on glass. At the age of fifteen he became a disciple of Rembrandt; and in that famous school he continued for three years, at the expiration of which he found himself qualified to study nature, the most unerring director.

From Rembrandt he learned the true principles of colouring, and obtained a complete knowledge of the chiaroscuro; but to that knowledge he added a delicacy of pencil, and a patience in working up his colours to the highest degree of neatness, superior to any other master. He therefore was more pleased with those pictures of Rembrandt which were painted in his youth than with those by which he was distinguished in his more advanced age; because the first seemed finished with more care and attention, the latter with more boldness, freedom, and negligence, which was quite opposite to the taste of Douw. But although his manner appears so different from that of his master, yet it was to Rembrandt alone that he owed that excellence in colouring by which he triumphed over all the artists of his own country.

His pictures are usually of a small size, with figures so exquisitely touched, so transparent, so wonderfully delicate, as to excite astonishment as well as pleasure. He designed every object after nature, and with an exactness so singular, that each object appears as perfect as nature itself, in respect to colour, freshness, and force. His general manner of painting portraits was by the aid of a concave mirror, and sometimes by looking at the object through a frame with many exact squares of fine silk. But the latter custom is disused, as the eye of a good artist seems a more competent rule, though the use of the former is still practised by painters in miniature.

It is almost incredible what sums have been given and are given at this day for the pictures of Douw, even in his own country, as also in Italy and every polite part of Europe; for he was exceedingly curious in finishing them, and patiently assiduous beyond example. Of that patience Sandrart gives a very strong proof in a circumstance which he mentions relative to this artist. Having once, in company with Bamboccio, visited Gerhard Douw, they could not forbear admiring the prodigious neatness of a picturewhich hewasthen painting,and inparticularnoticed a broom, at the same time expressing their surprise at the excessive neatness of the finishing of that minute object; upon which Douw told them he would spend three days more in working on that broom before he should account it entirely complete. In a family picture of Mrs Spiering, the same author observes, that the lady sat five days for the finishing of one of her hands that leaned on an arm chair. For this reason not many would sit to him for their portraits; and he therefore indulged himself mostly in works of fancy, in which he could introduce objects of still life, and employ as much time on them as suited his own inclination. Houbraken states, that his great patron Mr Spiering allowed him a thousand guilders a year, and paid besides whatever he demanded for his pictures, having purchased some of them for their weight in silver; but Sandrart, with more probability, assures us, that the thousand guilders a year were paid to Gerhard, on no other consideration than that the artist should give his benefactor the option of every picture he painted, for which he was immediately to receive the utmost he demanded. This great master died in 1674, aged sixty-one.