Interior of a church in Flanders

When the royal museum inventoried this panel in 1857, the entry read: interior of a temple by Peeter-Neefs, and figures. The architecture had an author. The people in it did not. Antwerp worked that way. Pieter Neefs the Elder spent a career painting church interiors in measured perspective, and when a panel needed a congregation, a specialist in small figures supplied one. Here that was Frans Francken the Third, from a long line of Antwerp painters with the same name. The two of them put this together in the second quarter of the 17th century.

It is a small board, 33 by 48 centimetres and four millimetres thick. Three naves run back into the gloom, with a cross raised on a pedestal in the middle of the main one, and the windows are glazed with flat panes. Down among the worshippers there is a dog.