The Flemish ‘Pictures of Collections’ Genre: An Overview

Abstract

The ‘pictures of collections’ genre was a special type of cabinet painting, and was invented, refined and popularized within the artistic community of early seventeenth‐century Antwerp. Depicting a sumptuous array of luxury goods, natural curiosities, connoisseurs and nobles in elegant interiors, the paintings that make up this genre were purposefully seductive, designed to parade the consummate skill of the Southern Netherlands’ finest artists at a time when the market for works of art was growing and highly competitive. Yet there is a heavy lacing of symbolism and allegory apparent in many of the images, and they were also intended to speak to the intellectual preoccupations of the age, from the cultivation of personal virtue to the honing of the critical faculties necessary for philosophy. The genre is explored by tracing stages in its evolution in the seventeenth century, and four types of collection making up the genre are distinguished. Finally, the historiography of the genre is investigated.

Notes

¹ We know very little about the ownership of these paintings. Those by Teniers, made for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm von Habsburg, were often used as diplomatic gifts (for bibliography, see below, n. 3). The archduke himself owned a Preziosenwand by Frans II Francken and a gallery interior by Hans III Jordaens, while Charles I of England owned at least one gallery interior. See Z. Z. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 61–2. In Milan, the German merchant Peter Linder commissioned an Antwerp gallery interior that hung in his studiolo. See M. J. Gorman and A. Marr, ‘“Others see it yet otherwise”: Disegno and Pictura in a Flemish Gallery Interior’, The Burlington Magazine, 149 (2007), 85–91. Indeed, Stoichita is quite wrong in claiming that painted gallery interiors were never exhibited in the collection itself, but were always gifts. See V. Stoichita, L'Instauration du tableau: Metapeinture a l'aube des temps modernes (Paris: Meridiens Klinksieck, 1993) (English translation: The Self‐Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta‐painting, translated by A.‐M. Glasheen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 108).

² The historiography of the genre is discussed in greater detail below. Key studies include (in chronological order) T. von Frimmel, Gemalte Galerien (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Siemens, 1896); J. Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator. An Antwerp Art Patron and his Collection’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, 50 (1957), 53–84; M. Winner, Die Quellen der Pictura‐Allegorien in gemalten Bildergalerien des 17. Jahrhunderts zu Antwerpen (Ph.D. diss., University of Cologne, 1957); S. Speth‐Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands des cabinets d'amateurs au XVII^e siècle (Brussels: Elsevier, 1957); R. W. Scheller, ‘Rembrandt en de encyclopedische kunstkamer’, Oud Holland, 84 (1969), 81–147; J. M. Hofstede, ‘“Non Saturatur Oculus Visu” – Zur ‘Allegorie des Gesichts’ von Peter Paul Rubens und Jan Brueghel d. Ä.’, in Wort und Bild in der Niederländischen Kunst und Literatur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, edited by H. Vekeman and J. M. Hofstede (Erftstadt: Lukassen Verlag, 1984), 243–89; Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp; Verzamelen: Van Rariteitenkabinet tot Kunstmuseum, edited by E. Bergvelt et al. (Haarlem: Open Universiteit / Gaade Uitgevers, 1993); U. Härting, Frans Francken der Jüngere (1581–1642). Die Gemälde mit Kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, 2 vols (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1992), 2: 83–90 (and relevant catalogue entries); David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y los gabinetes de pinturas, edited by M. Díaz Padrón and M. Royo‐Villanova (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992); A. S. Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur: Le grandi collezioni d'arte nei dipinti dal XVII al XIX secolo (Milan: Berenice, 1992); U. Härting, ‘“Doctrina et pietas”: Über frühe Galeriebilder’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1993), 95–133; Stoichita, Self‐Aware Image, esp. 77–87, 102–234; K. Van der Schueren, ‘De Kunstkamers van Frans II Francken: een kritische analyse van de aldaar aanwezige sculptur’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1996), 59–89; G. Schwartz, ‘Love in the Kunstkamer. Additions to the Work of Guillaume van Haecht’, Tableaux, 18:6 (1996), 43–52; E. A. Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); H. S. J. Becker, ‘Studien zur Ikonographie des Kunstbetrachters im 17, 18, und 19 Jahrhundert’ (Ph.D. diss., Rheinish‐Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule, 2005); U. D. Ganz, Neugier und Sammelbild. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zu gemalten Sammlungen in der niederländischen Malerei ca. 1550–1650 (Weimar: VDG‐Verlag, 2006), 195–227; K. Kleinert, Atelierdarstellungen in der niederländischen Genremalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts: realistisches Abbild oder glaubwürdiger Schein (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2006); Gorman and Marr, ‘“Others see it yet otherwise”’; Room for Art in Seventeenth‐Century Antwerp, edited by A. van Suchtelen (The Hague, Antwerp and Waanders: Mauritshuis, Rubenshuis and Zwolle, 2009). For further bibliography, see A. van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, n. 2 and passim.

³ For Teniers's pictures of collections, see David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y los gabinetes de pinturas; David Teniers and the Theatre of Paintings, edited by E. Vegelin van Claerbergen (London: Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2006). For developments in the second half of the century, when Coques was the dominant figure, see A. Van Suchtelen, ‘Collecting Within the Frame: Collaborative Gallery Paintings’, in Room for Art, 100–117.

⁴ Given that he was born in Valenciennes (part of the Spanish Netherlands until its conquest by France in 1768) and painted small‐scale oils, Watteau is in certain respects a natural inheritor of the Flemish tradition. For eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century examples of the genre, see Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur. The genre seems to have been exclusive to Antwerp until Teniers brought its conventions with him to Brussels upon his move to the Archducal court in the early 1650s.

⁵ For Antwerp, see Dupré in this issue. For the estimate, first made by Gary Schwarz, see Van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, 19.

⁶ On the liefhebbers der schilderyen, see Filipczak, Picturing Art, 47–57. On the art market in the Netherlands in the Early Modern period, see, e.g., N. De Marchi and H. J. van Miegroet, ‘Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century’, The Art Bulletin, 86 (1994), 451–64; M. North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).

⁷ Stoichita, Self‐Aware Image, 114.

⁸ See Hieronymus II Francken and Jan I Brueghel, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector's Cabinet (c.1621–3; Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum). As Filipczak and others have noted, the ‘encyclopaedic’ type of gallery interior continued to be painted into the 1660s, by artists such as Jan II Brueghel, Jan van Kessel and Hieronymus Jansenns (1624–93). However, in the later period, such images were not the norm. See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 131. On Drebbel's perpetuum mobile in gallery interiors, see H. Michel, ‘The First Barometer: A Rediscovery in Flemish Painting’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 35 (1977), 88–92. For curiosity, see N. Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, edited by R. J. W. Evans and A. Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

⁹ Scheller was the first to propose the 1650s as a transformative period, for which, see his ‘Rembrandt en de encyclopedische kunstkamer’. Filipczak dates the transformation to the 1640s, citing Frans II Francken's death in 1642 as a turning point and suggesting that, in his late works, Francken began to decrease the number of non‐art objects in his gallery interiors. See Filipczak, Picturing Art, Chapter 12, ‘Transformation of a Genre’. She points also to David II Teniers's Self‐Portrait in a Picture Gallery (Private Collection) as the earliest example of the genre in which non‐art objects have been almost completely removed from the interior (a handful of shells is visible on the buffet). She dated the work c.1640–51, but it is apparently dated (on a still‐life painting in the image) 1635, so perhaps the transformation can be pushed earlier still. See Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur, 83. We may say with certainty, though, that the main changes took place in the 1650s, with the Leopold Wilhelm pictures.

¹⁰ We should note that the late phase coincides with the rise of ‘artist in his studio’ imagery, which effectively eclipsed gallery interiors in the second half of the century. See, e.g., Kleinert, Atelierdarstellungen.

¹¹ See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 162–3, 191–201, and below for the position of her thesis in the genre's historiography. Filipczak has suggested (131–3) that the changes the genre underwent mirror shifting patterns of collecting in the seventeenth century. This is true, to a certain extent, but we should not forget that collections mingling objects of art and ‘science’ persisted well into the nineteenth century. It is worth noting that, just as we find interiors displaying exclusively art objects, a handful of images showing interiors containing objects of science only also appear by the turn of the century, such as the engraved Cabinet géométrique de Mr. le Clerc (London; British Museum).

¹² See van Suchtelen, ‘Collaborative Gallery Paintings’, in Room for Art, 102.

¹³ A number of gallery interiors from the 1660s and 70s feature group banquets, perpetuating the type of imagery seen in Frans II Francken's Banquet in the House of Burgemeester Rockox (1630–5) and the ‘elegant company’ images that influenced the genre c.1600, for which see below.

¹⁴ I first suggested this connection in the ‘Introduction’ to Curiosity and Wonder, 1–20 (11). Certainly, pictures of collections share with St Eloy imagery an interest in presenting in a positive light the world of artisanal work (for which, see de Vries's exploration of the rising value of technê, as displayed in pictures of collections, in this issue). Moreover, pictures of collections may be related to depictions of workshop interiors, such as those produced by Philips Galle after Jan van der Straet for Nova Reperta (Antwerp, c.1580s–90s) or the anonymous Flemish painting The Measurers (second half of the sixteenth century, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), for which, see J. Bennett, The Measurers: A Flemish Image of Mathematics in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 1996). In her contribution to this issue, de Vries suggests that Frans II Francken's Apelles and the Cobbler imagery, which may predate the first Flemish picture of a collection, should be counted as a further influence.

¹⁵ Although portraits by Titian such as Jacopo Strada (1567/8; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) were highly influential, it should be noted that earlier ‘portraits of collectors’, such as Parmigianino's Portrait of a Man (1524; London, National Gallery) also played a role. On Vredeman de Vries, see Hans Vredeman de Vries und die Renaissance im Norden, edited by H. Borggrefe, T. Fusening and B. Uppenkamp (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2002).

¹⁶ Vredeman de Vries adorned this particular interior with an oval painting of the Sacrifice of Isaac and a bust of Moses.

¹⁷ See F. C. Legrand, ‘Abel Grimmer, peintre d'architectures’, Revue Belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art, 26 (1957), 163–7.

¹⁸ The work (ex‐Christie's, London, 17 December 1999, Lot 7) is signed, inscribed and dated: ‘dá iá francis. franck. fin / et fecitá a o á1612’. The Christie's cataloguers suggest that the flower still life, birds and dog were painted by a collaborator, possibly Jan I Brueghel. For further discussion of the origins of the genre, see U. Härting, ‘Cabinet Picture, 2’, in Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, accessed 2009); Filipczak, Picturing Art, 217–18, ns 17 and 18, for the evidence. See also Van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, 21 (with illustration as Figure 3). Jan I Brueghel is sometimes credited with the invention of the genre but, as Filipczak points out, it is doubtful that any independently painted pictures of collections may be attributed to him.

¹⁹ The work is discussed very briefly by Filipczak, who follows Held's attribution of it to Mostaert, in Picturing Art in Antwerp, 129.

²⁰ The only other period image that I know of in which paintings are stacked, not for purposes of display (as in some of Teniers's images, for which, see Gage in this issue), but for storage, is a drawing of a domestic interior by Andries Both (London, British Museum; illustrated in Kleinert, Atelierdarstellungen, Figure 28). Both also undertook a series of ‘artist at work’ images, which are related to the pictures of collections genre. See Kleinert, Atelierdarstellungen, 182.

²¹ Stoichita, Self‐Aware Image, 115–16, at 116. Stoichita's reading is compelling, not least because, as he points out, the seven small‐scale sculptures on the gallery's ledge are in fact the planetary gods, who ruled Lomazzo's ‘Temple of Painting’ as set out in his Idea del tempietto della pittura (1590).

²² For the iconoclastic asses and their significance in pictures of collections, see, e.g., Filipczak, Picturing Art, 68–9; Stoichita, Self‐Aware Image, 117–24; Dupré in this issue. This subject does not seem to have enjoyed popularity independently of gallery interiors, although a scene of iconoclastic asses attributed to a follower of Frans II Francken appeared recently on the London art market. See ‘Old Master and British Paintings’, Sotheby's, London, 29 October 2009, Lot 23. In ‘Doctrina et pietas’, Härting has shown conclusively that religious belief was at the heart of the genre's origins and early development.

²³ See Kleinert, Atelierdarstellungen; Filipczak, Picturing Art, Chapter 14. My rough categories are extrapolated from Ursula Härting's useful summary of the genre, ‘Cabinet Picture, 2’. It is unlikely that clear distinctions between different types of pictures of collections were made at the time. In the period, such works were usually referred to by the term constkamer (art chamber) in Flemish inventories. See J. Denucé, De Antwerpsche ‘konstkamers’. Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16^de en 17^de eeuw (The Hague: De Sikkel, 1932); E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1984–9). See also Honig, Painting and the Market, 203–5; Van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, n. 1.

²⁴ Even de Bray's drawings are ambiguous, although the presence of what seem to be a shop assistant and female merchant at the counter do imply that his images are of commercial premises rather than private collections. Notably, they partake of the conventions of the Flemish paintings genre. For examples of this type of imagery, see W. Martin, ‘The Life of a Dutch Artist IV: How the Painter Sold his Work’, The Burlington Magazine, 11:54 (1907), 357–69. On incorrect identifications of early seventeenth‐century works as dealers' shops, see below, n. 55. An example of a Pand print is Aegidius Sadeler's Hall of St Wenceslas in the Castle of Rudolph II in Prague (1607).

²⁵ Two further ‘portraits of collections’, prior to Teniers's depictions of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's collection, have been proposed: the Collector's Cabinet (1621; Brussels, Musées Royaux) (Figure 3 in Gage's contribution to this issue), attributed to Hieronymus II Francken, and a Gallery Interior (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten), by Frans II Francken and an unidentified portrait painter (illustrated in Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur, 60). Speth‐Holterhoff claimed, on the basis of supposed similarities between certain figures in the interior and contemporary portraits of known individuals, that the former shows the shop of Jan Snellinck, the latter the cabinet of Sebastian Leerse. For conclusive arguments against the first suggestion, see below, n. 55. For doubts over the ‘Leerse’ painting, see Winner, Die Quellen der Pictura‐Allegorien, 32; Filipczak, Picturing Art, 61. A handful of drawings of identifiable collections survive, such as Michael Herr's Kunstkammer of Duke Johann Septimus Jörger (mid‐seventeenth century; Erlangen, University Library), but they tend to have been produced outside Antwerp. For more reliable engravings of collections (again unrelated to the Flemish genre), see below, n. 43.

²⁶ See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 58–9. The room in the Rockox painting is recognizable as one on the ground floor of the Rockox House in Antwerp. The room of van Haecht's painting is almost certainly imaginary. On the Rockox painting, see Samson en Delila. Een Rubensschilderij keert terug (Vienna, Antwerp and Milan: Liechtenstein Museum, KBC Bank NV, Rockoxhuis, Skira, 2007); Van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, 23–6. For the literature on van Haecht's painting, see Peterson's article in this issue. On the question of the documentary nature of pictures of collections, see also Honig, Painting and the Market, 281, n. 124; Dupré in this issue. It is sometimes suggested, erroneously, that Rubens's house is depicted in those pictures of collections that feature a semi‐circular exhibition space, although his collection must have provided a model for the genre in general. See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 60–1; J. M. Muller, ‘Rubens' Collection in History’, in A House of Art: Rubens as Collector, edited by K. L. Belkin and F. Healy (Antwerp: Rubenhuis and Rubenianum, 2004), 10–85 (48–9, 56). As Muller notes (37–9), the sculpted figures of Mercury and Minerva that appear not infrequently in pictures of collections were probably based on those at Rubens's house in Antwerp. A better example than the Francken painting cited by Muller is the anonymous Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Paintings (c.1620s; London, National Gallery; Figure 3)

²⁷ To take just one example, even though painted microscopically, a print on the left‐hand table in the foreground of Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Paintings may be identified as Hendrik Goudt's (after Adam Elsheimer), The Mocking of Ceres (1610). As Muller has pointed out, Hieronymus II Francken's Kunstkamer (c.1615–23) includes works that were owned by Rubens's friend, Philips van Valckenisse. Muller, ‘Rubens’ Collection in History’, 16.

²⁸ Before Teniers's paintings of Leopold Wilhelm, the best known are the figures in the Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest. While their identification as Sebastian Leerse and his wife is dubious (see above, n. 25), the figures in that Gallery Interior by Frans II Francken and an anonymous painter are undoubtedly portraits, not generic staffage. Several portraits of collectors in interiors from the post‐Teniers period are known, for which, see van Suchtelen, ‘Collaborative Gallery Paintings’.

²⁹ Occasionally, Italian works – mainly by the Venetian masters admired in Antwerp at the time – appear. A rare instance of central Italian images in the genre is Frans II Francken's Cabinet of a Collector (1617; Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II), which shows two studies for Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and a preparatory drawing for Raphael's Madonna della Perla. See C. White, The Later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2007), 116–17. In ‘De Kunstkamers van Frans II Francken’, van der Schueren has suggested that certain sculptures in pictures of collections were inspired by Raphael's work, as transmitted through Raimondi's engravings.

³⁰ It is not quite right to say, as van Suchtelen has done, that gallery interiors ‘always contain people’ (van Suchtelen, ‘Introduction’, in Room for Art, 18). Figures are entirely absent from a handful of the ‘gallery wall’ or Preziosenwand paintings by Frans II Francken.

³¹ On the anonymous figures' marks of aristocratic status (mainly swords and canes) and the disjuncture between the depicted and actual status of liefhebbers, see Filipczak, Picturing Art, 53–6. Filipczak, drawing on the work of Van de Wahl, suggests that the antiquated, Burgundian costume worn by some of the figures in gallery interiors is intended to alert the viewer to their potentially allegorical function (‘Picturing Art’, 67).

³² See Speth‐Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands, 77–8; Härting, Frans Francken, nos 459 and 460. Intriguingly, in no. 459 of Härting's catalogue, Lipsius's male companion seems to be a painting made flesh, for he is the individual depicted in the Portrait of a Man (in the manner of a later sixteenth‐century Italian painter) hanging at the top left of Francken's Preziosenwand in the Collection of the Duke of Northumberland (see Härting, Frans Francken, no. 445; Speth‐Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands, 92). Lipsius's portrait is after Rubens's so‐called Four Philosophers (1611/12; Florence, Palazzo Pitti). Filipczak's statement (Picturing Art, 216, n. 29) that persons ‘renowned for their intellectual accomplishments rather than social rank were rarely represented’ is, I think, an exaggeration. As we have seen, the Regents Albert and Isabella appear occasionally in pictures of collections, a nod to the archdukes' enlightened and expansive patronage, and, as Honig puts it, ‘the ideal to which any collector would aspire’ (Painting and the Market, 205). Sometimes, the archdukes are present in the gallery via works of art, as in the double‐portrait painting in the Rubens/Brueghel Sense of Sight (c.1618, Madrid, Prado; Figure 2 of Dupré's contribution to this issue) or the double‐portrait medal in Frans II Francken's Preziosenwand (1618; Antwerp, Rubenshuis, illustrated in Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur, 52). A coin in Frans II Francken's Cabinet of a Collector (1617; Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) bears the archdukes' names. In at least one instance – the earliest dated gallery interior by Francken – the mercantile context of Antwerp seems to be alluded to, for the seated ‘man of science’ in this image has been identified either as G. Vanpaemal of the famous Plantin press, or his successor, Balthasar I Moretus. See the catalogue entry for the painting, Christie's, London, 17 December 1999, Lot 7 (citing Härting).

³³ The classic account of the allegorical aspects of the pictures of collections genre is Winner, Die Quellen der Pictura‐Allegorien, although his findings have been modified somewhat by the later accounts listed in n. 1.

³⁴ This drawing is probably a study for The Simian Painter (Madrid, Prado), discussed very briefly in Filipczak, Picturing Art, 144.

³⁵ On this work, see David Teniers and the Theatre of Painting, 68–9. In addition to monkeys, parrots (probably signifying ‘memory’) and dogs (signifying either ‘fidelity’ or ‘keen sense’) appear regularly in pictures of collections. All three are present in the first (1612) example of the genre by Frans II Francken.

³⁶ The literature on this particular image is extensive. For a particularly rich and appropriately interdisciplinary account, see L. Daston, J. Renn, and H.‐J. Rheinberger, ‘Visions’, Max‐Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Preprint, 100 (1998).

³⁷ The Linder Gallery Interior (Private Collection, New York) is a good example of a highly personalized allegorical cabinet. See A. Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), Chapter 6.

³⁸ See, e.g., Filipczak, Picturing Art, passim; G. Schwarz, ‘Lady Pictura Painting Flowers’, Tableau, 15 (1993), 66–81; Gorman and Marr, ‘Others see it yet otherwise’.

³⁹ See, e.g., Härting, Frans Francken, nos 444, 446, 447. In at least one example, the wall gives way to a rotunda filled with scultptures, in which no figures are present: Härting, Frans Francken, no. 445.

⁴⁰ See, e.g., Härting, Frans Francken, no. 448.

⁴¹ For paintings of naturalia, see the Cabinet of a Collector (1617; Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II). One of the two images of insects and small animals on the wall of the picture bears the initials ‘ID’ or ‘JD’. One wonders whether they refer to De Gheyn. See White, Later Flemish Pictures, 116–17. For a cabinet of curiosities stuffed with goods, see Härting, Frans Francken, no. 445.

⁴² The bibliography on this topic is large, but for a useful overview, see E. Hooper‐Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992).

⁴³ For Imperato, see P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994), passim. For the Worm engraving, see H. D. Schepelern, ‘The Museum Wormianum Reconstructed: A Note on the Illustration of 1655’, Journal of the History of Collections, 2:1 (1990), 81–5. Several other, more or less reliable, engravings of seventeenth‐century collections are known, including those of Francesco Calceolari (1622), Manfredo Settala (1666) and Ferdinando Cospi (1677). See A. Lugli, Naturalia e Mirabilia: Il collezionsimo enciclopedico nelle Wunderkammern d'Europa (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1983).

⁴⁴ See Filipczak, Picturing Art, 161–2, for judgement in the second half of the century. For discrimination and discernment, see Dupré and Gage in this issue.

⁴⁵ See Härting, ‘Doctrina et pietas’; E. A. Honig, ‘The Beholder as Work of Art: A Study in the Location of Value in Seventeenth‐Century Flemish Painting’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 46 (1995), 253–97; Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo, Chapter 6.

⁴⁶ As Honig has shown, the emphasis placed on rhetoric (and the existence of rhetoric chambers in Antwerp) at the time is an important context for Antwerp painting in the early seventeenth century. See Honig, Painting and the Market, 54–60 and passim.

⁴⁷ For an elaboration of this theme, see Gage in this issue.

⁴⁸ On the economic circumstances of Antwerp and its luxury goods market at this time, see Filipczak, Picturing Art; Honig, Painting and the Market; F. Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp's Golden Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); M. P. J. Maertens and N. Peeters, ‘Paintings in Antwerp Houses (1532–1537)’, K. Van den Stighelen and F. Vermeylen, ‘The Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke and the Marketing of Paintings, 1400–1700’, M. Szanto, ‘Antwerp and the Paris Market in the Years 1620–30’, in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750, edited by N. De Marchi and H. J. Van Miegroet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 35–53, 189–208, 329–41; and, for a succinct overview and further literature, Dupré in this issue.

⁴⁹ See Honig, ‘The Beholder as Work of Art’; Painting and the Market. Collaborations in Antwerp were spurred on by the high demand there for pictures (which encouraged artists to pool their talents), and were facilitated by both the city's small size and the fact that many artistic families intermarried, thus intertwining professional and personal bonds.

⁵⁰ Honig, Painting and the Market, 204. This element of miniaturization undoubtedly partakes of the vogue for smallness and intricacy in the period, both of which were intimately connected to curiosity. See, e.g., A. Marr, ‘Gentille curiosité: Wonder‐working and the Culture of Automata in the Late Renaissance’, in Evans and Marr, Curiosity and Wonder, 149–70. On artistic collaboration in Early Modern Antwerp, see, in addition to Honig, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, edited by A. T. Woolett and A. van Suchtelen (Los Angeles: Getty Publications and Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2006).

⁵¹ For an overview, see Sonino, Cabinet d'amateur, 28–30; Honig, Painting and the Market, 177–8. This type of large‐scale collaborative gallery interior was revived, as we have seen, in the second half of the seventeenth century.

⁵² See A. van Suchtelen, ‘Collaborative Gallery Paintings’, in Room for Art, 105–6.

⁵³ It is worth noting that the genre was collaborative from the outset; indeed, the earliest dated example presents these challenges of attribution. The cataloguers of Frans II Francken's 1612 interior (see above, n. 18) suggest that works in the manner of David I Teniers and Hendrik van Balen depicted hanging on the gallery's walls may actually have been undertaken by these painters themselves, not Francken.

⁵⁴ For Brueghel, see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568–1625): kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, 2 vols (Lingen: Luca Verlag, 2008–10); for Francken, see Härting, Frans Francken. Of the other artists involved in the genre, only David II Teniers's oeuvre is secure to an acceptable degree.

⁵⁵ See S. Speth‐Holterhoff, ‘La boutique d'un marchand de tableaux anversois au XVII^e siècle’, in Miscellanea Leo Puyvelde, edited by G. Theunis (Brussels: Éditions de la Connaissance, 1949), 183–6; Speth‐Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands, 63–5. Deciphering the monograms is not easy. Indeed, Gregory Martin casts doubt on Speth‐Holterhoff's interpretation, and hence attribution, in his entry on Cognoscenti in a Room in National Gallery Catalogues: The Flemish School, circa 1600–circa 1900 (London: National Gallery, 1952), 68–73 (71). See also A. Monballieu, ‘Aantekeningen bij de schilderijeninventaris van het sterfhuis van Jan Snellinck (1549–1638)’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1976), 245–68; N. Peeters, ‘Venturing into the Interior: Revisiting the so‐called ‘Cabinet of Jan Snellinck’ by Hiëronymus Francken II (1621)’, in Polyptiek. Een veelluik van Groninger bijdragen aan de kunstgeschiedenis, edited by H. T. van Veen, V. M. Schmidt and J. M. Keizer (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002), 51–7 (52 and ns 6 and 7).

⁵⁶ For the Dutch attribution, see G. Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Flemish School, 72, n. 21, citing the 1892–1906 catalogues; for Hans III Jordaens, see W. Martin, ‘A Picture by Hans Jordaens in the National Gallery’, The Burlington Magazine, 14:70 (1909), 236–9.

⁵⁷ Gregory Martin stated, on the basis of reproductions, that the figures of the Vienna painting are ‘certainly in the style of Hans Jordaens; but whether this artist, whose personality is so clear, is Hans Jordaens II († 1653) or the III † (1643) is not certain’. Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Flemish School, 73. The provenance of the Vienna picture can be traced as far back as 1659, when it was listed in the inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (the very archduke whose collection Teniers pictured) with an attribution to Hans Jordaens. See Martin, ‘A Picture by Hans Jordaens’, 236.

⁵⁸ Louvre, ‘Atlas’ database of images (http://cartelen.louvre.fr), accessed 2009.

⁵⁹ As Gregory Martin has observed, ‘there is no connection between the execution of the figures in the Vienna picture and those in [Cognoscenti in a Room]’. Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Flemish School, 71. F. M. Kelly, in ‘A “Gallery” Picture by Cornelis de Baellieur’, The Burlington Magazine, 36:207 (1920), 293–9, noted that the figures of the Vienna painting have the feel of being a ‘conventional make‐weight’, whereas those of the London painting are ‘full as important as all the rest put together; they are painted with the microscopic finish of a miniature’ (294). To my mind, the figure looking out at us from the mid‐foreground of the painting has the feel of a portrait, perhaps a self‐portrait of the elusive artist himself.

⁶⁰ The architecture of Cognoscenti in a Room is even closer to another work by de Baellieur, once in the Brinckman collection (illustrated in Speth‐Holterhoff, Les peintres flamands, plate 46), which shows the same portico outside the gallery through the left‐hand window. See Kelly, ‘A “Gallery” Picture’, 294. Filipczak touches briefly on the reappearance of this architecture in Picturing Art, 60. It should be noted that Frans II Francken regularly repeated room layouts in his gallery interiors. See, e.g., Härting, Frans Francken, nos 450 and 451. Indeed, Filipczak (Picturing Art, 60) is wrong to state that the repetition of rooms is rare in pictures of collections.

⁶¹ The dissimilarity between the London and Vienna paintings has been argued forcefully in Kelly, ‘A “Gallery” Picture’. As he points out, the ex‐Brinckman picture is surely a variant of the Vienna work (or vice versa), for – in addition to the architectural similarities between them – the paintings lining the walls are in many cases the same. Not a single painting in either of these works reappears in Cognoscenti in a Room, although the disposition and sizes of the pictures lining the side of the armoire in the Vienna and London pictures are similar.

⁶² I am not, though, able to offer an attribution myself. In my opinion, Cognoscenti in a Room is closest in both manner and quality to the Linder Gallery Interior (discussed below). However, that work is painted on copper with a flat, off‐white ground (characteristic of the Brueghel studio), whereas the London painting is on panel, and features a vigorously painted grey ground (comparable to that used in the Rubens studio and circle).

⁶³ See W. R. Valentiner, ‘Rembrandt Drawings in the Havermeyer Collection’, Metropolitan Museum Studies, 3:2 (1931), 135–46. Valentiner expressed doubt about the attribution, but nonetheless gave it grudgingly to Jordaens.

⁶⁴ The Teniers works in question are Self‐Portrait in a Picture Gallery (1635; Private Collection), The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery (1651; Petworth House, Collection of the Earl of Egremond), The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery (c.1651; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).

⁶⁵ In terms of subject, but not composition, it is related to nos 309, 370 and 371 of Härting, Frans Francken.

⁶⁶ On the relationship between the Windsor drawing and the Linder Gallery Interior, see Gorman and Marr, ‘“Others see it yet otherwise”’. See also M. Clayton, Holbein to Hockney: Drawings from the Royal Collection (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2004), 106–7, where the drawing is incorrectly attributed to Frans II Francken. Gorman and I noted in our Burlington article that Rubens seems to be present in this drawing as one of the three cognoscenti in the gallery, alongside the patron, Pieter Linder. Gorman recently suggested that the third figure may be identified as Van Dyck – a plausible suggestion, although the features of this figures are sufficiently loosely drawn as to urge caution. See A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery, edited by M. J. Gorman (Florence: Alias, 2009).

⁶⁷ On the personal aspects of this painting, which celebrate the friendship between a German merchant (Pieter Linder) and an Italian mathematician and architect (Mutio Oddi), see Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo, Chapter 6.

⁶⁸ It is perhaps worth noting that these studies appeared in the wake of Panofsky's highly influential account of the relationship between visual realism and iconography, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). One cannot help but wonder also, though, whether the austerity of the immediately post‐war years highlighted the superabundance of seventeenth‐century pictures of collections, thereby attracting scholars' attention.

⁶⁹ Hofstede, ‘“Non Saturatur Oculus Visu”; Filipcak, Picturing Art.

⁷⁰ K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, translated by E. Wiles‐Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

⁷¹ For the former, see Härting, Frans Francken; for the latter, see ‘Doctrina et pietas’.

⁷² See especially, ‘Collaborative Gallery Paintings’, in Room for Art.