The story
In the early 1600s two men lived side by side on the Keizerstraat in Antwerp. Nicolaas Rockox was the city's burgomaster, a scholar and coin collector, and a close friend and patron of Rubens. Next door lived Frans Snyders, the painter of roaring hunts and heaped market stalls. Their two restored townhouses now form a single museum.
Rockox's home was a meeting place for Antwerp's artists, and he owned Rubens works made for these very rooms. A painting by Frans Francken records his art chamber down to the pictures on the wall, and the museum uses it as a guide, hanging 16th- and 17th-century Flemish paintings to echo the collection Rockox actually kept.
You move through domestic rooms with their leather chairs and box beds, past a Van Dyck and Snyders's own animal pieces, in the houses where these men entertained the painters we now line up to see.
