Gerard de Lairesse (1641-1711) was the most successful Dutch painter of his time, admired by the patricians of Amsterdam and the court of William iii of Orange. An eighteenth-century critic called him ‘undoubtedly the greatest genius there ever was in painting’.After a century of neglect his rehabilitation began in 1970 when the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum acquired a series of his monumental grisaille paintings. In an international exhibition (Cologne, Cassel, Dordrecht 2007) he was presented a...