A Visit to the Art Dealer

By 1636 Antwerp had become a trading floor of the European art market, and Frans Francken the Younger helped invent a whole genre to celebrate it, the painted picture gallery. On a small copper panel he packed a rich interior wall to wall with paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities, the kind of collection a wealthy Antwerp merchant might assemble. It is a picture full of other pictures, each one carefully made so it can be read. Francken, who had worked with the flower painter Jan Brueghel, had turned the collector's cabinet into a subject in its own right. He often slipped a small warning into these scenes, a monkey aping human vanity, a reminder that worldly things pass. The muted, near-monochrome colour here is typical of the quieter pictures he painted late in his career, in the last years of the 1630s.