One of the most striking creations by a Flemish master of trompe l’oeil paintings. It’s a strangely modern and intriguing work, in which we could see various prefigurings of later artistic movements. It partakes in, and simultaneously pokes fun at, figurative art. It hints at a fascination with the materiality of painting, the substance as the subject. There’s also something about the use of rectilinear lines to show us the reverse of an image which, albeit accidentally, somehow prefigures a very modern obsession with the non-representational image (the “non-image”, if you will), as expressed so strikingly in Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and other subsequent abstract works of the twentieth century. (Rijksmuseum)