Pieter Neefs the Elder

On a handful of panels the signature reads den auden neefs, the old Neefs. The painter was marking himself off from the two sons working beside him in Antwerp, Pieter the Younger and Lodewijk, who took the same subject out of the same workshop in the same manner.

That subject was the inside of a Gothic church, most often the wide nave of Antwerp Cathedral, a building stripped by Protestant iconoclasts in 1566 and again in the 1580s, then refilled with new altarpieces under Habsburg Catholic rule across the decades he was working. He rarely copied it straight. He shifted the architecture and hung it with paintings and sculpture of his own invention, and he showed it by daylight and, more unusually, at night, lit by two separate sources, a file of candles set against a lamp. The people under those vaults are mostly other men's work. Neefs left the figures to colleagues, among them Frans Francken the Younger and Sebastiaen Vrancx, Antwerp painters who specialised in small figures, and the Prado keeps a church interior of 1636 that Neefs and Francken signed together.

He was born about 1578 and was enrolled a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1609, though a signed painting dated 1605, now in Dresden, comes earlier still. Records place him alive on 26 February 1656, and the Gulden Cabinet, a book of painters' lives printed in Antwerp in 1661, already speaks of him in the past tense. Some 78 church interiors carry his name across more than 50 collections, and part of that number the literature would hand to his sons or to the workshop.