Attributed to Jan van den Hoecke

Pictures that museums now give to Jan van den Hoecke were long filed under other names, usually those of better-known pupils of Peter Paul Rubens or of Anthony van Dyck, the most famous of Rubens's assistants. In the 1630s van den Hoecke was himself one of the main assistants in Rubens's Antwerp workshop, where everyone was trained to paint close to the master and the individual hand is hard to see.

Attributed to Jan van den Hoecke is the label a museum uses when it believes he painted a work but cannot prove it. Much of the sorting has been done by the Belgian art historian Hans Vlieghe, a specialist in Rubens's circle. The firmest ground is the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who employed van den Hoecke in Brussels from 1647 and whose inventory lists dozens of pictures under his name.