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signed lower center D. Teniers. Fec oil on canvas Teniers was an incredibly prolific artist who specialized in rustic and low-life genre subjects. He became court painter in Brussels to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1661), the newly appointed governor of the Southern Netherlands, and also acted as his agent in the acquisition of pictures. At the end of 1651, Leopold sent him to London to buy paintings at the dispersal of the collections of Charles I and the Marquess of Hamilton. Sometime later, Teniers was appointed director of the Royal painting collection, producing in 1656 what must be considered one of the first illustrated catalogues of a collection, entitled the Theatrum Pictorium Davidis Teniers antverpiensis. Because of these various roles at court, Teniers either independently or on specific commission, contributed to the history of painting the invention of a genre which depicts in great detail the interior of Flemish picture galleries both real and invented. This genre was unknown outside of Antwerp at this time. Many of these paintings may have been ordered as gifts (for example, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Visiting his Gallery in Brussels (see fig. 1) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, was probably sent by Leopold to his brother Emperor Ferdinand III of Prague) either to recount the progress of the Archduke's collection or to impress the recipient of the painting. Moreover, given the Archduke's move to Vienna in 1656 (following completion of his tenure in the Netherlands), he may have wanted to have a precise visual record of his collection (of now hundreds of paintings) or to record for posterity a particular moment in the ``life'' of that collection. The various ``gallery'' pictures of Archduke Leopold probably date from the first half of the 1650s (two are dated; one in Petworth to 1651 and another in Vienna to 1653; see The Age of Rubens, p. 580, note 6 in literature below). The present painting of A Picture Galle