Os Coletores de Impostos (The Tax Collectors) - Discípulo de Quentin Massys

 

Os Coletores de Impostos (The Tax Collectors) - Discípulo de Quentin Massys
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This composition of the Tax Collectors, also known as The Misers, clearly enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity in the mid-sixteenth century and in generations to follow, for some sixty versions of it are known today. A common feature shared among the various versions of this composition is that two figures sit alongside each other, wearing archaic headgear and surrounded by ephemera that differs slightly from one painting to another. It has been suggested by some scholars that their principal debt is to Marinus van Reymerswaele’s Tax Collectors in the Louvre. More recently, however, Larry Silver has argued that the prototype for this particular design is a painting by Quinten Massys in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections in Vaduz/Vienna. The Vienna painting seems to have inspired versions by Marinus van Reymerswale, Jan van Hemessen, and Jan Massys (the artist’s son), among many others.
The present picture comes closest in composition to a painting by Marinus van Reymerswale in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. An inscription on the papers hanging on the shelf in the Hermitage painting reads “my honorable and good friend, Quin[ten] Masys,” and while the meaning of this has yet to be resolved, it further links the composition to Massys and lends weight to the hypothesis that Reymerswale worked in Massys’ workshop in Antwerp early in his career. The present picture also belongs to a particular group of variants that are slightly larger in size, comparable in dimensions, for example, to a panel in the Royal Collection at Windsor as well as the panel recently sold at Sotheby’s in London, both of which are given to a Follower of Marinus van Reymerswale.