Fish Market with Ecce Homo

Market scenes of this monumental kind were the speciality of Antwerp in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and Joachim Beuckelaer was their most prolific master. He trained with his uncle Pieter Aertsen, the painter traditionally credited with inventing the genre, and became a master of the Antwerp guild himself in 1560. The formula they shared sets the goods of the market or the kitchen across the foreground while a biblical episode — here the Ecce Homo, the presentation of Christ to the people — is left small and easily missed behind them, and the abundance was never neutral: viewers were expected to read it as a warning about the pull of the material world, with the sacred scene standing as the picture’s conscience. The panel is signed and dated 1570, and it belongs with the museum’s group of his market pieces. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.