Born in Dordrecht in January 1634, he studied painting under Rembrandt in Amsterdam in the late 1640s or early 1650s. He married in 1654 in Dordrecht and stayed there until he moved, before 1673, to Amsterdam where he was buried on 24 December 1693.

His earliest dated work, The Dismissal of Hagar of 1653 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) is Rembrandtesque; but in the mid 1660s the domestic interiors he painted in Dordrecht were probably the inspiration for the more refined, but slightly later subjects of de Hooch, and Vermeer. From 1660 he concentrated, with success, on portraiture.