Willem van Haecht

In 1628 Willem van Haecht became keeper of one of Antwerp's great private art collections, owned by the spice merchant Cornelis van der Geest. The same year he painted it. His Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, now in the Rubens House in Antwerp, shows the collector's room packed with pictures and visitors, among them Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, the rulers of the Southern Netherlands, who had toured the collection in 1615.

Pictures of rooms full of recognisable paintings were an Antwerp speciality, and van Haecht came from the heart of that world. His father, the landscape painter Tobias Verhaecht, had been one of the first teachers of the young Rubens. Willem worked in Paris from 1615 to 1619, then spent about seven years in Italy, and became a master in the Antwerp painters' guild in 1626.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague has his Apelles Painting Campaspe, from around 1630. The subject is an ancient story in which Alexander the Great gives his mistress Campaspe to the painter Apelles, who has fallen in love with her while painting her portrait. Van Haecht sets it in a Flemish picture gallery, and many works on its walls can still be identified, among them Rubens's Battle of the Amazons, an early Samson scene by Anthony van Dyck and a hunting still life by Frans Snijders. Van Haecht died in 1637, still in his forties.