A Picture of Pictures

In 1628 Willem van Haecht painted a room in Antwerp containing forty-three other paintings. Twenty-four of them still exist and hang in museums around the world. At least one of them exists nowhere else: a lost Jan van Eyck of a woman bathing, which survives only as a few square centimetres inside somebody else's picture.

That is the situation I want to look at. A picture that quotes other pictures is doing something every screenshot, mood board, reference deck and citation does, and the seventeenth-century Antwerp version has the advantage of being four hundred years into the experiment, so we can see what happened.

Five pictures that contain other pictures

1. Van Haecht, and a room that never existed

Willem van Haecht, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628. Oil on oak panel, 102.5 × 137.5 cm. Rubenshuis, Antwerp, City of Antwerp Collection. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The picture looks like a record of a state visit. Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella sit before the collector Cornelis van der Geest, who is presenting a Quinten Massys Madonna. Rubens stands behind the Archduke. Van Dyck is in conversation with the Mint Master of Antwerp. Nicolaas Rockox, Jan Wildens, Frans Snijders and Hendrick van Balen are all identifiable. Van Haecht himself is at the doorway, doffing his hat.

It is not a record. Albert died in 1621. Prince Władysław Vasa of Poland, also in the room, visited in 1624. The panel is dated 1628. The picture collapses several occasions into one room that never held all these people at once.

The 2019 to 2021 conservation at KIK-IRPA found something better. The panel was physically enlarged during execution, two boards added near the point of signing, and the inscription altered. The picture of a collection grew to fit its contents, like a shelf being extended.

And the perspective does not agree with the social scene. The vanishing point of the whole composition does not fall on the Madonna everyone is looking at. It falls on Rubens's Battle of the Amazons, low on the left wall. The geometry and the etiquette disagree about what matters in the room.

2. Las Meninas, and a copy of a copy of a lost original

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo Nacional del Prado, P001174. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two dim pictures hang on the back wall above the mirror, and almost nobody looks at them. They are copies made by Velázquez's son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo: one after Rubens's Pallas and Arachne, one after Jordaens's Apollo as Victor over Pan, which is itself a reworking of a lost Rubens.

Both subjects are the same story. A mortal challenges a god at the god's own craft and is destroyed for it. Arachne weaves better than Athena. Pan plays against Apollo. Velázquez put two paintings about the fatal danger of imitation directly above his own head, in a picture where he is depicted painting.

Worth flagging that the identification is scholarly, not institutional. The Prado's own catalogue entry does not discuss the back wall at all, and the standard reference sources disagree with each other about which artists are being copied. A copy of a copy of a lost original, mis-catalogued for centuries, is a fitting thing to find inside the most analysed painting in Europe.

3. Vermeer, who kept reusing the same pictures

Vermeer hangs the same paintings on his walls across different canvases. Dirck van Baburen's Procuress of 1622 appears in both The Concert and the Lady Seated at a Virginal in London. It probably belonged to his mother-in-law Maria Thins, so he was painting a picture he actually owned.

The old reading was that the Baburen proves the room is a brothel. Current scholarship reads it the other way: the calm of Vermeer's scene makes the inner picture a caution against sensual indulgence rather than an endorsement of it. The quotation works as an antithesis, not a caption.

In Woman Holding a Balance a Last Judgement hangs behind her while she holds empty scales at equilibrium. The National Gallery of Art's own object text declines to interpret the background picture at all, noting only that the scales suggest her inner state.

4. The Dresden Cupid, and a citation somebody deleted

Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, in the state before the 2021 restoration. The back wall is bare. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

An X-ray in 1979 showed a painting of a naked Cupid on that empty wall. For four decades the assumption was that Vermeer had painted him out.

The 2017 to 2021 research overturned it. The overpainting was applied at least several decades after the picture was made, and significantly after the artist's death, by somebody else. Christoph Schölzel removed it with a scalpel under a microscope and the Cupid came back in 2021, standing on two theatrical masks, which the Dresden curators read as sincere love overcoming deception.

So: Vermeer cited another picture, a later hand deleted the citation, and three centuries after that a third party restored it. The inner picture has been present, absent and present again, and only one of those three states was the artist's decision.

5. Teniers, and the first illustrated catalogue

David Teniers the Younger, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery in Brussels, about 1650 to 1651. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, GG 739. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Teniers was keeper of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's collection and painted it repeatedly. He also produced, in Brussels in 1660, the Theatrum Pictorium: 246 plates, 243 of them reproducing Italian paintings, about half the Archduke's Italian holdings, with four pages of introduction in Latin, French, Spanish and Dutch. It is the first illustrated printed catalogue of a picture collection.

The production chain is the point. Teniers painted small oil copies after the originals; engravers cut plates from those copies; the plates were printed. The catalogue is three removes from the painting, and every remove is a lossy compression performed by a different person.

And it still works. Most of the recognisable paintings in the Vienna gallery view are in the Vienna collection today, three hundred and seventy-five years later. The picture functions as a finding aid.

A sixth, briefly, because it is the same idea in 1833

Samuel Morse spent fourteen months painting Gallery of the Louvre, cramming forty works, by the Terra Foundation's own count, into the Salon Carré. They were not in the Salon Carré. They were scattered all over the Louvre. He curated a room that did not exist, published a descriptive catalogue in 1833 to explain it to Americans who would never see the originals, and the whole thing was a commercial failure. Then he gave up painting and invented the telegraph.

What quotation does to the thing quoted

Table 1. Five things a quotation can do to its source, none of which the quoter controls.

Video. "Ein neuer Vermeer: Brieflesendes Mädchen am offenen Fenster wird restauriert," Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, with English subtitles.

Three things I hold onto

• The copy can outlive the original, so quote carefully. Van Eyck's bathing woman exists only because somebody put a small version of it on a painted wall in 1628. Every low-fidelity reproduction in your reference folder is a candidate for being the last surviving version of something.

• A quotation carries its own argument, and the argument drifts. The Baburen has meant two opposite things inside the same Vermeer within living memory. Nothing about the inner picture changed. What changed was the frame of reading around it, which the original maker cannot control and should not assume.

• The room was assembled, not recorded. Van Haecht's gallery, Morse's Salon Carré, and every mood board ever made are the same object: a curated space that misrepresents itself as an observation. That is not dishonest, but it is worth labelling, because in four hundred years somebody will read it as a document.

A panel-by-panel walk through van Haecht's room, naming the paintings inside it and where they are now, is on my Korean blog: 베이니월드.

Sources

The van Haecht, its 43 paintings and 24 survivors, and the figures named in the room: Rubenshuis, Antwerp and Flemish Art Collection. The panel enlargement and the vanishing point on the Battle of the Amazons: KIK-IRPA. Las Meninas: Museo Nacional del Prado. The Baburen in Vermeer and the reversal of its reading: Essential Vermeer. The Dresden Cupid, its removal and the finding that the overpaint was not Vermeer's: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. The Theatrum Pictorium, its 246 plates and four-language introduction: Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Courtauld. Morse's figures and people: the Terra Foundation's own key.

Not asserted: the year of the Archdukes' visit, which no museum source gives; the current location of the Massys Madonna at the centre of the van Haecht; and the Prado's institutional position on the back-wall copies, since its catalogue entry is silent on them.