Windsor Castle from Eton, with a view of the River Thames in the foreground

Born and trained in The Hague, Hendrick Danckerts entered the city's Guild of St Luke as an engraver in 1651 but later turned his hand to painting. After a sojourn in Italy in the second half of the 1650s, he settled in London, where his topographical views in particular would find remarkable success. Commissions came from a distinguished array of royal and aristocratic patrons, including Henry Herbert, later first Duke of Beaufort, the Duke of St Albans, and the Earls of Bedford, Radnor, and Berkeley; his most important patron however was Charles II, to whom he became court painter. The King commissioned views of many of the royal properties, including Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace and the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Royal inventories include numerous entries of identifiable topographical views, as well as classical Italianate landscapes. His paintings were often commissioned in groups and set into decorative schemes or mounted as overdoors.

Windsor was clearly a subject in demand and Danckerts painted several further views of the castle, including one commissioned by the Earl of Radnor. In 1669, diarist Samuel Pepys commissioned a set of panels for his dining room from the artist. Pepys recounts his meeting with ‘Mr Dancre, the famous landscape painter’ in a diary entry from January of that year: ‘he took measure of my panels in my dining-room, where, in the four, I intend to have the four houses of the King, White Hall, Hampton Court, Greenwich, and Windsor’.

Signed and dated 1679, the present painting is amongst his last works. After two lucrative decades or so in England, the increasing threat to Catholics and the Popish Plot drove Danckerts back to Holland at around this time, where he would pass away shortly after his return.