Willem Dolphyn's compositions often came to him at night; the glass, china, fruit and textiles assembling themselves in his mind before he set them out in the north light of the studio the next day, and from that single room he produced around 2,500 paintings that place him within the long tradition of Flemish still life. Born Willem Leo Jan Dolphyn in Antwerp on 17 May 1935, he was the only son of Anna de Ridder and the painter Victor Dolphyn, who taught at the Antwerp Academy from 1941, and his first known drawing, made at the age of four, records a group of swans he had watched at Antwerp Zoo. His grandfather's stories of the East set the course of a second lifelong interest. At fifteen Willem signed on as an ordinary seaman and sailed to Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya, painting miniatures of the voyage as he went, and a year after his return in 1951 he bought his first samurai sword, the beginning of a collection that grew to 95 swords and 20 suits of armour and led him in 1982 to co-found the To-Ken club, the Belgian society of collectors of Japanese arms and armour. His training was precocious: he entered the Antwerp Academy in 1950 and at seventeen became the youngest student ever admitted to the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts. Two years of national service with the 29th Engineering Corps, much of it spent moving bags of cement, followed from 1954, and a first exhibition of miniatures at Nijenrode Castle in the Netherlands in 1957. It was Monique Verschuren who took his work beyond Belgium, organising sell-out exhibitions in Zierikzee in 1983 and at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague in 1984, and then bringing him to London to meet Bill Patterson. The first Dolphyn exhibition at W. H. Patterson in Mayfair opened in 1985 and began a partnership of more than thirty years.