Workshop of Marinus van Reymerswaele

This panel in London is a careful copy of a picture now in the Louvre, and the drawing under the paint shows how it was made. The outlines were traced, the way a workshop transferred a design from an original or from a pattern taken from it. The painting itself is handled differently from Marinus's own, in some ways with more polish, so the National Gallery gives it to his workshop, perhaps to a member he had not trained himself.

Two men sit at a table in a panelled room, with documents piled on a cupboard behind them. One writes in a ledger, and the other reaches for coins with a sneer. The composition was repeated, and simpler versions survive in Antwerp and Warsaw.

When the London panel belonged to the collector Wynn Ellis it was called The Money Changers and given to Quentin Massys, the older Antwerp painter. It came to the National Gallery with his bequest in 1876.