Jan Sanders van Hemessen

Jan Sanders van Hemessen liked to paint the moment in the Gospel when Christ walks past a tax office and calls the tax collector Matthew to follow him. He returned to it again and again, and made a small drama of the scene: a table heaped with coins and ledgers, money changers caught mid-gesture, and one calm figure among the greed. In at least one version the tax collector wears the face of Emperor Charles V, then ruler of the Netherlands.

Van Hemessen worked in Antwerp in the first half of the 16th century, when the city was the busiest market in northern Europe and money changing was its daily business. He built large half-length figures pushed close to the picture surface, a Flemish way of pressing a Bible story right up against the viewer, and helped make the everyday commercial scene a subject worth painting.

His compositions stayed in demand long after his death around 1566. The Metropolitan Museum in New York owns an early-17th-century copy of his Vienna 'Calling of Saint Matthew', made decades later because buyers still wanted it.