Interior of Antwerp Cathedral at Night

The signature is on the base of a pier at the lower right, P. NEFS, with the year set out in dotted figures, 1.6.3.8. Pieter Neefs spent his working life in Antwerp painting the insides of churches, and here he took the nave of Antwerp Cathedral as his pattern and showed it after dark. The panel is small, about 39 by 50 centimetres. The way it reached Boston is less expected. It was given to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1921 by William Sturgis Bigelow, a Boston doctor who had sailed for Japan in 1882, stayed seven years, took vows as a Buddhist and sent home a vast collection of Japanese art, much of which he also gave to the museum. Among all those scrolls, prints and sword fittings, he owned this Flemish Catholic church by night. Bigelow died in 1926, and part of his ashes was buried at a Buddhist temple in Otsu, on the shore of Lake Biwa.