Cornelis de Baellieur

Low down on a panel in the Louvre, near a painted doorway, a painter signed his name BAELLIUR and added the year 1637. The picture shows the interior of a collector's gallery, and it is the only cabinet of this kind that can be given to Cornelis de Baellieur with confidence. Even so, the museum thinks the signature claims more than he painted. It credits him with the figures and gives the architecture and the paintings on the walls to Hans Jordaens III, an older Antwerp painter who specialised in such rooms.

Gallery pictures like this were an Antwerp speciality, and Frans Francken the Younger, from a whole family of painters in the city, was among the first to make them. The Louvre calls Baellieur his imitator and rival. One picture shown above the fireplace, an allegory of the Four Elements, closely follows a version by Francken and the landscape painter Abraham Govaerts.

Baellieur was baptised in Antwerp in 1607, became a master of the city's painters' guild in 1626, at 19, and served as its dean in 1644. Few of his works survive. The old masters gallery in Kassel, in Germany, received his Christ Carrying the Cross, painted on copper, as a gift in 2022. The Louvre panel arrived in 1864, bequeathed by the collector Alexandre Cart of Saint-Cloud.