Interior with Figures in a Picture Gallery

Very little on these walls was painted by the man in charge. Gonzales Coques, working in Antwerp, directed this large canvas in 1672 and painted the elegant figures in the foreground. The architecture of the grand hall went to a specialist, and the pictures hung across it recall works by a dozen Antwerp painters of the day, among them Erasmus Quellinus, Pieter Boel and Jan van Kessel, alongside copies after Rubens, van Dyck and Velázquez. For viewers at the time, much of the fun lay in naming as many of the masters as they could. Technical research in 2001 found that the little pictures were done by no more than five hands, so the painters on show did not all paint their own. The canvas was in Antwerp in 1741, later at the palace of Het Loo, and in 1763 it entered the collection of Prince William V. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V, where the prince's paintings are still hung frame to frame, much as they are in the picture.