Cornelis van der Geest‘s ‘Art Room from the Rubens House‘ collection has arrived at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. From the Museum Aan de Stroom (MAS), where the work could be admired for several months in the masterpieces exhibition ‘Rare & Indispensable‘, the painting left for two years to one of the most prestigious museums in the world. 

The Rubens House is currently closed for renovations. While the artist’s home is being restored, the art collection is a guest in museums at home and abroad.

Art room

A masterpiece full of masterpieces, that is how this special painting can be described. This ambitious performance is the painted representation of Cornelis van der Geest’s art collection. At the beginning of the 17th century, an exclusive genre of painting emerged in Antwerp: ‘Constkamers‘. In such an art room, the painter collects the collection of an art collector so that he can show it off. 

The master of the genre is Willem van Haecht from Antwerp. Only three of his art rooms are known, this example shows the collection of Cornelis van der Geest, an important Antwerp art connoisseur and friend and patron of Rubens.

42

The painting is chock full of precisely executed copies of Van der Geest’s collection. 

With no fewer than 42 paintings depicted, of which 21 are still known today, this work is a museum in miniature. It is also a unique group portrait. A kind of ‘who’s who’ of the cultural elite of the time. 

The painter and the patron are depicted on it and stand between Peter Paul Rubens, Archdukes Albrecht and Isabella, Ladislas Wasa, the future King of Poland, Anthony van Dyck and the originally Spanish art collector Jacomo de Cachiopin. 

Both Van der Geest and Van Haecht have business ties with Spain. They sell paintings there and Van der Geest also stays there for a while. It is therefore logical that this work will be on display in the Museo del Prado during the closure of the Rubens House. Cornelis van der Geest’s ‘Art Room’ is the perfect addition to the own collection of art room paintings, including ‘The Five Senses‘. Rubens also ventured into the genre together with Jan Brueghel I.

Rubens House

In addition to the ‘Art Room’, two other works can be seen in museums abroad. 

The marble statue ‘Hesperus‘ – from Rubens’ own collection – leaves for the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (Netherlands). Rubens uses this luxuriously sculpted support for a wall console or table as inspiration when painting, for example, standing Christ children. During the closure of the Rubens House, the statue joins a small group of statues in Leiden that also come from Rubens’ collection.

The painting ‘Moses and Sephorah‘ by Jacques Jordaens is on loan to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (United States) until October 2027. During ‘Ethiophia at the Crossroads‘, an exhibition that examines Ethiopian art in a global context for the first time, Jordaens is one of the few old masters from Western art who is critical of the (then) relationship between whites and blacks.