Jan Six I

Jan Six (14 January 1618, Amsterdam – 28 May 1700, Amsterdam) was an important cultural figure in the Dutch Golden Age. Biography From a well-to-do cloth merchant family Six (family name), Jan Six was the son of Jean Six (1575–1617) and his wife Anna Wijmer (1584–1654). His father died two months before Jan was born. Jan studied liberal arts and law in Leiden in 1634. He became the son-in-law of the mayor of Amsterdam, Nicolaes Tulp, in 1655, when he married Tulp's daughter Margaretha. Thanks to his father-in-law, he became magistrate of family law and various other appointments on the city council, eventually becoming mayor of Amsterdam himself in 1691, aged 73. Six was good friends with the poet Joost van den Vondel and the painter Rembrandt van Rijn, during the forties. Rembrandt depicted Six in the Portrait of Jan Six, and in the etching of the same title. Six remained a devotee of the arts all his life and wrote plays himself, the most famous being Medea, published in 1648 (with an etching by Rembrandt), and Onschult (Innocence) in 1662. In the same year the Dutch translation of Baldassarre Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano was dedicated to Six.