Pieter Janssens Elinga

Pieter Janssens Elinga painted quiet Dutch interiors built from geometry: tiled floors, tall windows and patches of light on bare walls, with one or two figures absorbed in their tasks. His rooms are close in feeling to those of Pieter de Hooch.

He was born in Bruges in 1623, moved to Rotterdam in 1653 and then to Amsterdam in 1657, where he spent the rest of his life. He also made perspective boxes, optical devices that create a convincing illusion of a room, and one is in the Museum Bredius in The Hague. He died in Amsterdam in 1682.

Reading Woman, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, shows a woman seen from behind in a sunlit room, a small best-known work of stillness.