Interior with a Company

In the early 1620s two specialists working in The Hague shared this panel. Bartholomeus van Bassen built the room, and his colleague Esaias van de Velde painted the people in it, a partnership that produced dozens of pictures in those years. The room itself never existed. Van Bassen furnished it from the pattern books of the architect Hans Vredeman de Vries, whose prints taught a generation of painters how to construct perspective. A small hole has been found in the fireplace, exactly where the lines of floor and ceiling meet, probably left by the pin that anchored his guide lines. Among the pictures on the right-hand wall is a Sacrifice of Isaac. A chained monkey sits in the front corner, and a parrot perches on the open door that carries his signature.