A drawing of an interior, with walls filled with pictures and an open arch with ballustrade at far wall; three figures are standing to left of the octagonal table at the centre foreground. Various pieces of sculpture are on tables to the right and on the floor.

Frans Francken the Younger was born into an extensive family of Flemish artists, active over several generations from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. His most distinctive paintings - among a number of genres that he originated or developed - were his views of interiors, dense with paintings, sculptures, musical and scientific instruments, sea-shells and other collectibles, and populated by figures who converse, eat, drink or make music. The paintings-within-the-painting are often identifiable (though the interiors themselves are usually fictitious), and their subject matter occasionally provides an allegorical gloss on the activities of the figures below.

All the elements depicted here are familiar in Francken’s paintings, though none of the works of art, or even their subjects, can be identified, and the composition does not correspond with any individual painting. It is unusually large for a preparatory drawing, but it is doubtful that Francken intended it as a finished work, and it may have been a model to give a prospective patron an idea of the artist’s intentions, the details to be elaborated later.

The popularity of such views of cabinet rooms reflects the self-consciousness of collecting in seventeenth-century Europe. The cabinet room served a practical purpose, as a secure storage space for small works of art and precious objects; but it could also function as a reception room, where a connoisseur could discuss works of art with his friends, as here, or impress a visitor with his taste, erudition or wealth. The inventory of Charles I’s cabinet at Whitehall lists coins and medals, miniatures, gold, jewels, and books; Cassiano dal Pozzo’s palace in Rome was full of birds, ancient inscriptions, paintings, fossils, sculptures and much else; Nicolaas Rockox’s collection in his Antwerp house (depicted in a painting by Francken) was of such importance to his self-image that his portrait drawing by Van Dyck includes an antique head as his sole attribute.

Text adapted from Holbein to Hockney: Drawings from the Royal Collection