Pieter Neefs the Younger

The interior of Antwerp Cathedral, the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, is the building Pieter Neefs the Younger painted more than any other. He painted it as it stood, and he also took it apart, reusing its pillars, vaults and side chapels to assemble churches that never existed. Many of his church views are these invented buildings.

He was baptised in Antwerp on 23 May 1620, the son of Pieter Neefs the Elder, one of the first Flemish painters to specialise in church interiors. The son was working beside his father by about 1640 and seems never to have enrolled in the Antwerp painters' guild as an independent master, which fits a career spent inside the family workshop. After the father's death, sometime after 1656, Pieter and his brother Lodewijk took the workshop over.

Neefs painted the architecture and usually left the people to specialists. The small worshippers, beggars and priests in his churches come from painters such as Frans Francken III, David Teniers the Younger and Bonaventura Peeters. Like his father he also made night pieces, the same nave lit by candles and torches, sometimes paired with a daylight view. His earliest dated painting is from 1646 and his last from 1675, and after that he disappears from the record.