Geldwisselaar en vrouw, 1514 (The Money Changer and His Wife)

Two people are positioned close in a small room. It feels like they are close in front of you. The man is intently counting jewels and money with a scale. Next to him his wife is looking at his work, distracted from the religious book she is holding. Both figures are looking at the money on the table. There is also a curved mirror on the table that shows a window and the outside world. The interesting thing about this painting is that mirror. The mirror was used before in Flemish paintings and makes the viewer feel like they are part of the scene. The painter, Matsys, perhaps means to direct the greed shown in the painting towards the person looking at it. The painting pulls you in. The conventional iconography itself is a moral caution. The wife is not paying attention to her spiritual endeavours. The frame of the painting used to have a quote from the Bible that reinforced this idea. Some people think it was commissioned by a group of scholars who were friends with Pieter Gillis when he got married in 1514. They think it is encouraging people to think about good and bad similar to how the man is sorting his money. Matsys painted this when Antwerp was becoming a big deal in finance in Northern Europe. Many people were moving there to escape the Spanish Inquisition. This painting is not just a random person. It is a real person that many would have recognized. In a place where business and morality were always being discussed, the painting felt important and relevant. The painting was indeed very popular when it was made. Another painter, Marinus van Reymerswaele used the same format and made it into a caricature within 25 years. Local discourse and the proliferation of the painting itself hints that it clearly meant something important during that time. For three hundred years it was in important collections, passing from merchants in Antwerp to an art dealer in Amsterdam then to a collector in Paris, before going to the Louvre in 1806. Its journey follows the trade routes shown in the painting.