A Goldsmith in His Shop

A goldsmith stands at his counter in a narrow Bruges interior, holding a small balance scale in his hands as a young man in a red chaperon weighs a wedding ring before a lady in a tall horned headdress, the shelves behind them stocked with brooches, beads, ewers and coral. Petrus Christus painted the picture in 1449, within a few years of Jan van Eyck’s death, and the panel stands as one of the first great genre scenes in European painting — a moment of everyday commerce observed with the new realism of early Netherlandish art and flooded with the clear, tender light that enters through the leaded window. A round convex mirror at the edge of the counter reflects the street outside and its two passers-by, a signature flourish that links the picture to the celebrated Arnolfini Portrait. The painting is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.