An alchemist at work in a vaulted room, with a woman seated next to a baby in a cradle

Thomas Wijck is perhaps best-known for his interiors depicting inns and alchemists. Such scenes of disorderly laboratories, populated with miscellaneous vials and crucibles, almost certainly ‘offered a pleasurable novelty’ to seventeenth century viewers (E. B. Drago, Painted Alchemists: Early Modern Artistry and Experiment in the Work of Thomas Wijck, 2019, p. 17.). This novelty is amplified in Wijck’s pictures, which tend to conflate the professional and domestic into one hybridised space.
The present picture draws on familiar Dutch alchemical imagery, with vaulted ceilings, taxidermic fixtures and mislaid books strewn across the floor. Yet, ‘Wijck’s alchemist is no shabby, bankrupt peasant … he is a scholar’ (ibid., p. 19.), perched on a desk wearing an understated chaperon, typical of academic dress, absorbed in his studies. To his right, the alchemist’s presumed wife glances over a bassinet, performing needlework while a young boy sits to her right. In spite of the workshop’s cluttered mess, the picture is pervaded by a sense of calm, with the figures each engaged in their respective work. What emerges is not a scene of experimental folly but rather of serious enterprise. Wijck’s treatments of alchemists are ultimately sympathetic, perhaps acknowledging a kind of commonality between painter and scientist, both practicing artisans in their own right.