Follower of Marinus van Reymerswaele

Anonymous sale, New Orleans Auction Galleries, 21 March 2015, lot 411;

Where acquired by the present collector.

Colorado Springs, Edward C. Rochette Money Museum, American Numismatic Association, long-term loan, 2014 - 2023.

Marinus van Reymerswaele’s Tax Collectors belongs to a celebrated group of satirical compositions that secured the artist’s reputation as one of the most incisive commentators on civic vice in sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting. Set within a wood-paneled interior, two deliberately unflattering figures, lavishly dressed yet morally compromised, are absorbed in the mechanics of financial record-keeping. One bends over a ledger, pen poised mid-entry, while his companion rakes a heap of coins toward himself. Their exaggerated physiognomies, coupled with the compressed space and conspicuous materialistic clutter transform an ostensibly mundane bureaucratic task into a pointed allegory of avarice.

The composition is known in numerous versions, attesting to its enduring popularity. Reymerswaele and his workshop appear to have produced multiple replicas of the successful composition, with the prime version generally identified as the panel in the Musée du Louvre (inv. no. RF 1973 34), distinguished by its freehand underdrawing. Such repetition underscores the market demand for these pointed moralizing images. Often mischaracterized as money changers, the figures instead represent tax collectors, officials remunerated by a percentage of the revenues they extracted, making them emblematic targets for critiques of bureaucratic and legalistic greed. In Reymerswaele’s hands, the apparatus of accounting becomes a vehicle for social satire, exposing the corrosive effects of corruption beneath the veneer of civic order.