Gaspar de Witte

[1] Gaspar de Witte trained with his father, who was specialized in landscapes, church interiors and religious paintings.

The earliest works in this genre represented art objects together with other items such as scientific instruments or peculiar natural specimens.

[9] An example of a gallery painting by Caspar de Witte is the Interior of an art collector's cabinet with many visitors, which is a collaboration with Hieronymus Janssens and Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg.

The figures in the gallery painting are portrayed as if they form part of an elite who possess a privileged knowledge, i.e. the ability to appreciate art.

The genre of gallery paintings had by that time become a medium to accentuate the notion that the powers of discernment associated with connoisseurship are socially superior to or more desirable than other forms of knowing.

The statues and books on the table and the musical instrument below refer to a wider embodiment of the Arts in general.

[11] The picture can also be regarded as an allegorical representation of the vanitas of worldly pursuits such as war which are transient in comparison to the arts and love, which endure for forever.

[12] It depicts a room full of pictures populated with human figures who are usually interpreted as representing art connoisseurs.

[13] A cabinet of pictures depicts an imaginary gallery and can be seen as a summing up of the best of what artists in mid 17th-century Antwerp could produce.

[15] The fact that de Witte was selected to participate in this collaborative effort demonstrates the esteem in which he was held by his fellow artists in Antwerp in his time.