Visit in a Sculptor’s Studio

Balthasar van den Bosch belonged to the Antwerp generation that looked back to the city’s seventeenth-century greatness as though it were still unfolding around them, and his studio interiors re-create that golden age for their own time. Here a visitor in Polish dress, attended by a servant, has just entered a sculptor’s workshop, where the master presents a bust of a young prince while antique pieces, a celestial globe and two apprentices fill the room. The globe carries its traditional meaning, the harmony that the visual arts were thought to share with music and astronomy. The canvas is signed and dated 1704, and the Nationalmuseum, which acquired it in 1959, catalogues it among the historical studio scenes then in fashion in Antwerp, several of which show the same bust of the young prince. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.