Background
Bartholomeus van der Helst was born in 1613 in Haarlem, Netherlands, the son of a Haarlem innkeeper called Lodewijk and his second wife, Aeltgen Bartels.
Bartholomeus van der Helst was born in 1613 in Haarlem, Netherlands, the son of a Haarlem innkeeper called Lodewijk and his second wife, Aeltgen Bartels.
Van der Helst may have trained with Nicolaes Eliaszoon Pickenoy.
Van der Helst was a resident at Amsterdam in 1636. His first great picture, representing a gathering of civic guards at a brewery, is variously assigned to 1639 and 1643, and still adorns the town-hall of Amsterdam. His noble portraits of the burgomaster Bicker and Andreas Bicker the younger, in the gallery of Amsterdam, of the same date no doubt as Bicker's wife lately in the Ruhl collection at Cologne, were completed in 1642. From that time till his death there is no difficulty in tracing Van der Helst's career at Amsterdam. He acquired and kept the position of a distinguished portrait-painter, producing indeed little or nothing besides portraits at any time, but founding, in conjunction with Nicolaes de Helt Stokade, the painters' guild at Amsterdam in 1654. At some unknown date he bought himself a house in the Doelenstrasse and ended by earning a competence. His likeness of Paul Potter at the Hague, executed in 1654, and his partnership with Backhuysen, who laid in the backgrounds of some of his pictures in 1668, indicate a constant companionship with the best artists of the time. Wagen has said that his portrait of Admiral Kortenaar, in the gallery of Amsterdam, betrays the teaching of Frans Hals, and the statement need not be gainsaid; yet on the whole Van der Helst's career as a painter was mainly a protest against the systems of Hals and Rembrandt. It is needless to dwell on the pictures which preceded that of 1648, called the Peace of Munster, in the gallery of Amsterdam. He was the teacher of his son Lodewijk who followed his style. Marcus Waltes was his pupil in 1650. He had no other known pupils but exerted an influence on Govert Flinck, Eustache Lesueur, Constantin Hansen, Alexander Sanders and Abraham van den Tempel. The artist died in Amsterdam in 1670. While the artist had been able to charge very high prices for his work, he appears to have lived above his means. He had bought a large house and acquired many paintings of leading artists such as Frans Floris, Simon de Vos, Goltzius, Adriaen Brouwer, Pieter Lastman, Gerard van Zyl, Simon de Vlieger, Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, Otto Marcelis and Willem van de Velde. After his death his wife was compelled to offer his works and those from his art collection for sale in 1671 in an advertisement in the Haarlems Dagblad. In addition to the portraits for which he is most famous, Bartholomeus van der Helst painted a few genre, historical, biblical, mythological and allegorical scenes. In all these paintings, the portrait aspect is still important.
In 1636, Van der Helst married there Anna du Pire, an 18-year-old woman from a prosperous family from the Southern Netherlands who was already orphaned. The couple had six children of whom one called Lodewijk (1642 - c. 1684) became a portrait painter like his father.