According to Karel van Mander, Hendrick van Steenwyck the Elder, c.1550-1603, was a pupil of Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527-1606). His son Hendrick the Younger was born in Antwerp in c.1580 and in 1585, after the Spanish reconquest of Antwerp, Hendrick the Elder took the family to Frankfurt in order (in van Mander’s words) ‘to escape the cruelties that Mars, a bitter enemy of art, inflicted on the people there’. Having trained with his father, Hendrick II probably returned to Antwerp some time in the first years of the seventeenth century, before departing for London. There he seems to have lived from 1617 to 1637, during the heyday of the courts of James I and Charles I. He finished his career in The Hague in Holland.

The Figures on a Terrace and the Liberation of St Peter (Royal Collection) are two tiny roundels that can both be dated to c.1615; they are similar but not identical in size and technique. They may have been conceived as a pair or been joined in the collection of Charles II (or before) as a ‘marriage of convenience’. They demonstrate two aspects of Steenwyck’s art: the bright fantasy palaces, learned from De Vries, and the expressive torch-lit dungeons, possibly inspired by prints after Adam Elsheimer (an artist he might have known in Frankfurt in the 1590s).

Both these scenes have morals that complement each other, whether or not they are conceived as a pair. Scenes of young aristocrats courting in pleasure gardens, to the sounds of the lute, would immediately have suggested to a contemporary viewer the idea of the heedless vanity of youth and the transitory nature of its joys. An illustration in an emblem book published in Strasburg in 1580, ‘Eight-line Verses on the Vanity and Inconstancy of the World’ (Octonaires sur la Vanité et Inconstance du monde), shows a similar formal garden with the words ‘The world is a garden, its pleasures are flowers . . . but Death is winter.’ It is even possible that the transparent appearance of the buildings and the thread-like paint application (almost as if the scene is spun out of a spider’s web) are intended to suggest that the pleasure garden is a dazzling but insubstantial phantom.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in The Queen's Closet at Kensington Palace (RCIN 922154).