The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Picture Gallery in Brussels

In January 1649 Charles I of England was executed, and the collections of the English court and of its richest aristocrats went on the market. Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, was in Brussels buying hard through agents, and within a few years he had several hundred Italian pictures. This copper plate is his inventory of them, painted by David Teniers the Younger, who was his court painter and the keeper of the collection. The museum dates it 1647 to 1651 and settles on no single year. Teniers made several of these gallery views for the archduke, so the version in Vienna is a different picture, larger and on canvas. This one the archduke sent to Madrid, to Philip IV, not long after it was finished. The copper matters, because a hard smooth plate is what keeps the pictures inside the picture legible at this size. Low on the right, among the frames propped against the wall, is van Dyck's portrait of Isabel Clara Eugenia in the habit of a Poor Clare. She had governed these same provinces before him, and died in Brussels in 1633.