Portrait of Johannes Gansacker I

Phoebus Focus XXXIII

This Phoebus Focus tells the remarkable story of the man whose identity can now for the first time be confirmed as Johannes Gansacker I (1592-1664) and recounts the striking history of his portrait. It allows Gansacker to be identified as one of many young, ambitious entrepreneurs in seventeenth-century Antwerp. A self-made social climber who was only too eager to be portrayed at the start of that climb by a painter who harboured exactly the same ambitions.