The archive / Baroque / The Reverse of a Painting
The Reverse of a Painting
Cornelius Gijsbrechts · 1625–1675
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 11×14″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 18×24″.
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The work
There is no front to this painting.
A wooden stretcher, a scatter of nails, a small note tucked under the frame, and the decorative molding around it: this is the whole picture. Cornelius Gijsbrechts painted only the back of a canvas. From across the room you believe a painting has been set on the floor with its reverse turned out, and only as you step closer does the trick give way. He made it as court painter to the Danish king, sometime between 1668 and 1672.
Look closer
The whole illusion is built from shadows.
Follow the shadows and the trick comes apart in your hands. The frame casts onto the stretcher; the stretcher casts onto the canvas back; the note and the nails throw their own small darks. Every one is painted, not real. For the deception to hold, the picture had to hang so that these faux shadows fell in step with the actual light in the room. Light it wrong and the spell breaks.
Why it matters
A picture made to fool a king's cabinet.
Imagine it among the marvels of the King's Perspective Chamber, in the Royal Danish Cabinet of Curiosities, around 1700. There it likely sat with other playfully deceptive pieces, each rewarding the visitor who looked twice. A painting whose joke was that it pretended to be no painting at all. The perfect guest for a room built to delight and mislead.
the most radical meditation about painting as an object and as an image— Victor I. Stoichita, art historian
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Reverse of a Painting
- Artist
- Cornelius Gijsbrechts
- Year
- c. 1670
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 66.4 × 87 cm
- Collection
- SMK — National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark), Copenhagen — KMS1989 (public domain, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
