An allegory of painting and poetry

This is one of two drawings made for the decoration of a now lost eighteenth-century collector’s cabinet known as a Panpoëticon Batavûm (All the Dutch poets). According to written and graphic sources the Panpoëticon would hold over 350 miniature portraits of Dutch and Flemish poets, writers, and artists and was set in the Dutch literary society's meeting room in Leiden where it was damaged by a fire in 1807.

Jacob de Wit received the commission to create a grisaille to decorate the interior panel of the cabinet’s door. A second, slightly more finished, preparatory drawing of the same dimensions is in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (inv. no. T 043; T. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Jacob de Wit beschildert kunstkasten’, in Album Amicorum J.G. van Gelder, 1973, p. 227, ill.).

In 2016 a three-dimensional digital rendering of the cabinet was created by Lieke van Diensen and Timothy de Paepe (fig. 1; see van Diensen and de Paepe, op. cit., pp. 49-58) and it is thanks to this research that we are able to clearly understand the function of de Wit’s composition and visualize it in the cabinet.

Fig. 1. Lieke van Diensen and Timothy de Paepe, Computer visualisation of the 3D model of the Panpoëticon with the door opened.