Charles Emmanuel Biset. The composition uses the tale of William Tell to create a group portrait of the leading members of the schutterij. The Portrait of a family in an interior (Sold at Christie's on 19 April 2007 in New York, lot 31) was originally attributed to Gerard Pietersz van Zijl but is now attributed to Biset. This composition follows the model of the merry companies with its informal setting which includes children and musicians. A less informal rendering of the same subject is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Genre scenes Genre subjects involving indoor scenes of playing persons were quite popular in Flemish and Dutch painting in the 17th century and in particular among the so-called Caravaggists. Biset painted similar genre scenes an example of which is his composition the Tric-trac players (Statens Museum for Kunst). The composition shows an interior with two standing men playing tric-trac and three onlookers. One of the onlookers is engaged in a lively exchange with a maid who is handing him a glass of wine. A young male servant is pouring drinks for the company at a table on which also food is placed including oysters, a few of which have fallen on the floor. The overall setting seems to point to a company that is actively enjoying itself but may be on the verge of losing control. Gallery paintings Biset worked also in the genre of the 'gallery paintings'. The 'gallery paintings' genre is native to Antwerp where Frans Francken the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder were the first artists to create paintings of art and curiosity collections in the 1620s. Gallery paintings depict large rooms in which many paintings and other precious items are displayed in elegant surroundings. The earliest works in this genre depicted art objects together with other items such as scientific instruments or peculiar natural specimens. The genre became immediately quite popular and was followed by other artists such as Jan Brueghel the Younger, Cornelis de Baellieur, Hans Jordaens, David Teniers the Younger, Gillis van Tilborch and Hieronymus Janssens. The art galleries depicted were either real galleries or imaginary galleries, sometimes with allegorical figures. An example of Biset's work in this genre is the Interior of an Imaginary Picture Gallery (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) dated to 1666. This composition falls into the category of allegorical picture galleries, which can be considered a sub-category of the imaginary