The Precision of Portraiture Jan Appelius remains a figure defined by the specific demands of late eighteenth-century portraiture. His work does not rely on grandiosity but on the steady, technical execution required to capture the likenesses of the Dutch and Swiss elite. To look at his surviving canvases is to see a painter focused on the social realities of his era, documenting the faces of families like the Radermachers with a direc…