Interior with Figures in a Picture Gallery

Pictures showing rooms full of paintings and other works of art are known as gallery paintings (kunstkamers). It was a genre that flourished in seventeenth-century Antwerp. This particular gallery painting is unusual since as many as twenty artists worked on it. Each artist contributed one or more of the miniature paintings, co-ordinated by Gonzales Coques, who also painted the figures in the foreground. For a contemporary viewer of a group work like this, it would have been great fun to see who could recognise the most masters.

Stadholder William IV purchased this work at an auction in 1741 and it was installed in Het Loo Palace. His son William V later brought the painting to The Hague, where it hung in his Gallery.