Interior

Once restoration of the house had been completed, it remained for the interior to be furnished – no easy task. After Rockox’s death in 1540, the entire contents were sold for the benefit of the poor and it was therefore impossible to return them – dispersed, as they were, partly in museums – to the Rockox House.

However, like the restoration of the house, furnishings and art were chosen with due regard for what was historically correct and was based on, among other things, three important contemporary documents.

• The first is the complete inventory of the contents of the house, drawn up on 20 December 1640, after Rockox’s death, by notary-public David van der Soppen. The public deed is in the archives of the Maagdenhuis (Maiden’s House), orphanage for girls in Antwerp.
  Where the notary-public’s inventory is not altogether clear in its description of furniture and art work, it can be interpreted on the basis of the many genre, art-gallery and still-life paintings of the seventeenth century.
• The second is the manuscript catalogue that Rockox made of his coin collection, which is now preserved in the Meermanno-Westreenianum State Museum, The Hague.
• The third is the important painting De Kunstkamer van Burgemeester Rockox (Burgomaster Rockox’s Art Gallery) by Frans Francken the Younger (now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich), which was commissioned by Rockox and which portrays his beautiful art gallery the Groot Saleth (Great Parlour).

Authentic contemporary documents have thus made it possible to imagine the sumptuousness of the interior.