Frans Francken the Younger was the most famous of an Antwerp dynasty of painters; he trained with his father, Frans the Elder (1542-1616), and joined the Antwerp guild in 1605. He was a painter of religious and historical subjects as well as being the inventor of the genre presented here, the cabinet painting.Collectors throughout Europe tended to keep their most prized and smaller possessions in a small private study, called a ‘cabinet’ in French and English (sometimes ‘cabinet of...
