Interior of a Flemish Church

The first certain sighting of this panel is an inventory of 1834, drawn up after the death of Ferdinand VII. It hung in the second room of the Flemish school in the Real Museo in Madrid, entered as a view of the inside of a Gothic cathedral by P. Neefs. A cataloguer went over it again in 1857 and set down what is happening in it. Several aisles, a good number of altars, mass being said at the nearest one and heard by various people, and others standing about in different attitudes. Those others take up most of the picture, which is an upright panel, 84 centimetres high against 72 wide. The Prado dates it no closer than the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th. Its catalogue number kept moving, 1305 in the 1850s, 1499 from 1872, 1599 from 1910, and the first of those is still painted in orange in the lower left corner.