Frans Francken the Younger

In early 17th-century Antwerp there were so many painters named Francken that buyers could barely tell them apart. Frans the Younger, born in 1581, trained with his father, Frans the Elder, joined the city's painters' guild in 1605, and for years signed his panels 'the young Frans Francken' to keep himself separate from his relatives. After his father died in 1616 he began signing 'the old Frans Francken' instead.

He was the most prolific of the whole clan, and the most inventive. Alongside altarpieces and small mythological scenes, he fixed a format that Antwerp would make its own: the painted collector's cabinet, a room shown wall to wall with pictures, shells, coins and marble heads, each rendered small and exact. He also helped popularise the singerie, a comic scene of monkeys dressed as people at human business.

Those cabinet pictures were a kind of portrait of collecting itself, made just as Antwerp's merchants were filling real rooms with curiosities from the new trade routes. Francken kept a busy workshop turning them out, and his densely packed panels, often no larger than an open book, hang today in European galleries from the Royal Collection in London to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.