Interior of an Imaginary Picture Gallery

Dating to 1666 and held by the Bavarian State Painting Collections, this imaginary picture gallery interior belongs to a distinctive Flemish genre — the Kunstkammer or gallery painting — pioneered by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Francken II in the early seventeenth century. These imaginary interiors crowded with paintings, sculptures, and curiosities served as visual arguments for the supremacy of Flemish art and as fantasy catalogues for collectors. Coques's version, painted at the height of his career, likely includes depictions of actual paintings from Antwerp collections alongside invented works, making it a compressed art-historical document. The genre was popular with patrons who wished to display their cultural sophistication and connect themselves to the great collecting tradition centred on the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, whose own collection had recently been inventoried. Munich's Bavarian collections received many Flemish works through Habsburg diplomatic networks.

Painting pictures within a picture demands two different scales of execution: the framing architectural interior painted at normal handling, and the depicted paintings rendered in miniature with sufficient legibility to evoke real works. Coques navigates this by simplifying depicted paintings to their essential tonal masses while preserving enough detail for plausible individual identification.