Biography

Dutch painter, merchant and naval officer. He lived in both Leiden, where he was married in 1647, and Amsterdam, where he was a friend of the painter Karel Slabbert (c. 1618-54). Koedijk seems to have had financial problems in both cities. In 1651 he travelled with the Dutch India Company to Batavia and Agra, where he was to serve as court painter to the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Koedijk was employed as a merchant in Surat and Ahmadabad by the Batavian government and the Dutch East India Company until 1659, when he returned to the Netherlands as commander of the fleet. Thereafter he was active in Haarlem and Amsterdam until his death.

Isaack Koedijck was influenced by the Leiden fijnchilder Gerrit Dou, and his interest in perspective and light in the depiction of bourgeois interiors anticipates the work of Delft School artists such as Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. Koedijck's finest paintings were made from the late 1640s to circa 1650, shortly before he spent a decade in the Dutch East Indies. His surviving oeuvre is small, partly because of his activities as a merchant in the East, but also because two major works from the 1771 Gerrit Braamcamp sale were lost at sea en route to Catherine the Great's collection.