Tax Collectors, or The Misers

This is an exceptionally detailed version of one of the formative images of late Flemish genre painting. Depicted are two gentlemen in archaic costume writing up accounts and counting out money. It was an image that enjoyed widespread popularity, with some sixty known versions dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; these differ in the complexity of the costume and detail of the still-life elements. Though many scholars have suggested that the original composition belonged to Marinus van Reymerswaele, Larry Silver has recently argued for the prime being the painting in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections in Vaduz and Vienna, which belongs to the oeuvre of Quentin Massys (see L. Silver, ‘Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered’, The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Summer 2015).

One reason for the popular success of the image was its positioning at the intersection between economic necessity and socially acceptable practices. Quinten Massys’s picture was created in Antwerp at a time of financial crisis during the 1520s, when war between Emperor Charles V and his rival France led to a reduction in international shipping and the German Peasants War of 1525 helped to cut off silver and copper shipments. In these circumstances, the value of gold inflated, making the emphatic representation of the large gold coins in the Massys’s composition especially important. This historical framework was contrasted with the deep-rooted social antipathy towards tax collectors; indeed, a Netherlandish proverb of the time proclaimed that ‘a usurer, a miller, a money-changer, and a tax-collector are Lucifer’s four evangelists’. Massys’s painting and its subsequent versions play on these ideas of political and social greed, whilst adding whimsical elements – the knowing smile of the gentleman to the right, the outlandish headgear, the wart on the end of scribe’s nose – that allowed patrons to laugh with the artist at the issues of their time.

The present version shares many details with the Lichtenstein painting, notably in the inclusion of specifically identifiable coins. These include the gold florin and the gold ducat of King Charles I of Savoy, and the gold double ducat of Gugliermo II Paleologus, marquis de Montferrat. In its exact details, however, the present painting relates most closely to a version in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, currently attributed to van Reymerswaele (inv. no. L 1048).