Gaspar de Witte

• Illustration — Interior of an art collector's cabinet with many visitors Gaspar de Witte was a collaborator in a few compositions belonging to the genre of the 'gallery paintings'. The 'gallery paintings' genre is native to Antwerp where Frans Francken the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder were the first artists to create paintings of art and curiosity collections in the 1620s. Gallery paintings depict large rooms in which many paintings and other precious items are displayed in elegant surroundings. The earliest works in this genre represented art objects together with other items such as scientific instruments or peculiar natural specimens. The genre became immediately quite popular and was followed by other artists such as Jan Brueghel the Younger, Cornelis de Baellieur, Hans Jordaens, David Teniers the Younger, Gillis van Tilborch, Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg and Hieronymus Janssens. The picture galleries depicted were sometimes real galleries. However, the majority were imaginary galleries, which sometimes included allegorical figures. 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 composition depicts an imaginary art gallery with many visitors who are appreciating and discussing some of the artworks in the gallery. This gallery painting represents a later development in the genre initiated by David Teniers the Younger that excluded non-art objects from the gallery. 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. • Illustration — The allegorical female figures Nature and Pictura in an art-collection, with representative Antwerp canvasses Gaspar de Witte has been identified recently as the painter likely responsible for an allegorical gallery painting referred to as The allegorical female figures Nature and Pictura in an art-collection, with representative Antwerp canvasses. Rather than representing an actual depiction of a picture gallery with collectors, art dealers or famous painters this composition falls into the allegorical type of gallery painting as it places two allegorical figures in the gallery. The figure of Plenty on the left has beside her three putti bearing a cornucopia, symbolizing her largesse. Seated beside her is a personification of Pictura or Painting who is identified by the palette in her hands. The statues and books on the table and the musical instrument below refer to a wider embodiment of the Arts in general. The allegory was intended to be one of Peace or the effects of Peace since in the lower right hand corner of the gallery are the accoutrements of war, discarded in a pile. 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. Gaspar de Witte was one of the collaborators in the gallery painting by Jacob de Formentrou referred to as Cabinet of pictures, currently in the Royal Collection. It depicts a room full of pictures populated with human figures who are usually interpreted as representing art connoisseurs. The various pictures that are hung on the walls of the room represent works of leading mid-17th-century artists of Antwerp. 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. It is believed that the pictures included in the composition were painted by each of the relevant artists. Gaspar de Witte is believed to have painted the landscape right of the door, signed G.D.WITTE. 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.