The Holy Family in a Flower Garland

The Kunsthistorisches Museum believes this panel came from the Jesuit college in Antwerp, and the year it reached Vienna, 1776, fits that story. In 1773 the pope dissolved the Jesuit order, and across the Habsburg Netherlands the colleges were closed and their contents inventoried and sold off. A Jesuit house was a natural home for the picture, because the man who painted the flowers, Daniel Seghers, was a brother of the order living in that same Antwerp community. The wreath is his, dated 1644. The small Holy Family in the middle is by another hand. The museum now gives it to the Antwerp figure painter Simon de Vos, though for a long time it was credited to Erasmus Quellinus the Younger.