Dirck van Delen Heusden circa 1605 - 1671 Arnemuiden

With Didier Aaron & Cie, Paris, 1978;
With Maurice Segoura, Paris, from whom purchased by the present collector in 1986.

The sumptuous interior depicted in this painting is almost certainly imaginary.  In creating some of his fantastical settings, van Delen drew inspiration from the architectural pattern books of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries.  This interior is very close to a plate in Hans Vredeman de Vries's Scenographiae, sive Perspictivae of 1560 (see Fig. 1) and was used by van Delen on other occasions.  Two other paintings with similar rooms are An Interior with Ladies and Cavaliers, also dated 1629, in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin and another interior with portraits of members of the House of Orange in the the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. A3939).  The elegant couple at far right is represented in other van Delen compositions, including the Dublin picture.

We are grateful to Bernard M. Vermet  for confirming the attribution, on the basis of photographs.  He also confirms all the figures to be by van Delen, though based on figures by Dirck Hals with whom he studied around 1626/28.