of his furniture. He had several children, and seems to have stopped painting for almost the last decade of his life, perhaps influenced by the illness and death of his wife. Like his brother he was a city councillor; as a member of the main Dutch Reformed Church he was involved in the struggles with the Remonstrants. His best known work, and almost his largest, is the near life-size Perseus and Andromeda in the Louvre. Producing his highly finished small paintings was probably not very economic, and he was not short of money; his own pleasure and fame were probably his main motivations. His granddaughter still owned 30 of his paintings in 1669. Reflecting an increase of interest in Wtewael's art in recent decades, in 2015–16 Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638), the first major exhibition devoted solely to his work, showed in Utrecht, Washington DC and Houston, Texas. Life Wtewael was born and spent almost all of his life in Utrecht, where he died. He was the son of a glassmaker and glass painter who had settled in Utrecht in 1566. He began his career in Utrecht, according to Carel van Mander, as a glassmaker and glass engraver in his father's workshop. In 1586, he began four years of travelling and living in Italy and then France, the latter in the household of the bishop of St Malo, Charles de Bourgneuf de Cucé. His main Italian base was in Padua, close to Venice, and his earliest works show awareness of the Second School of Fontainebleau, which was probably the result of visiting there. Returning to Utrecht in about 1590 (by 1592 at the latest), Wtewael established a workshop and joined the saddlemakers' guild (which in Utrecht then covered painters as well) as a painter and began producing paintings, drawings, engravings, and stained glass. Later he was a founder member of the new Utrecht Guild of Saint Luke for the painters of Utrecht. He never lived elsewhere, and seems never to have travelled outside the Netherlands again. A gentlemanly contemporary in Utrecht, who might be thought in a good position to know the artist and his work, also praised very highly Wtewael's skill in sculpture, but no clear examples of this are known. He married Christina Wtewael van Halen (1568–1629), whose portrait of 1601 makes a pair with the self-portrait illustrated. In 1596 they had a son