Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg or Willem Schubart van Ehrenberg was a Flemish painter mainly active in Antwerp who specialized in architectural paintings including of real and imaginary church interiors, Renaissance palaces and picture galleries.
Life
Most likely born in Antwerp where his baptism is recorded on 12 May 1630, he entered the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1662. He resided in Antwerp for most of his life. It is possible he travelled to Italy as he made drawings of Italian subjects. The date of his death is not known with certainty and is believed to have occurred between 1687 and 1707. He was the teacher of the painter of architecture paintings Jacobus Ferdinandus Saey. His son Peter Schubart von Ehrenberg was also an artist who had a successful career as a painter, engraver and stage designer in Vienna.
Van Ehrenberg painted many architectural paintings usually of imaginary church interiors, temples, palaces and art galleries. Paintings such as the Interior of the Saint-Carolus-Borromeus Church in Antwerp emphasize the Baroque architecture of the space depicted, but are more artificial than his Dutch Golden Age contemporaries such as Pieter Jansz Saenredam or Emanuel de Witte. His :File:Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - Interior of St. Peters' in Rome.jpg|Interior of the St. Peters' Church in Rome stands in the tradition of Antwerp architecture art from the first half of the 17th century. However, the spatial effect in the oeuvre of van Ehrenberg is stronger. He showed a particular preference for the fantastic and pathetic, which he emphasized further with light-dark contrasts and a staffage of almost dwarfish figures. Of particular interest are a set of paintings representing the Seven Wonders of the World such as the :File:Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - The Seven Wonders of the World; The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.jpg|Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and :File:Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - The Seven Wonders of the World; The Temple of Diana at Ephesus.jpg|The Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the two paintings of :File:Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - Ruined Tomb.jpg|ruined tombstones.
Gallery paintings
Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg 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 van Ehrenberg's work in this genre is the :File:Gaspar de Witte, Hieronymus Janssens, Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - Interior of an art collector's cabinet with many visitors.jpg| Interior of an art collector's cabinet with many visitors. This is a collaboration with Gaspar de Witte and Hieronymus Janssens. The composition depicts an imaginary art gallery with many visitors who are appreciating and discussing some of the artworks in the gallery. This gallery painting represents a later development in the genre initiated by David Teniers the Younger, which excludes non-art objects from the gallery. The figures in the gallery painting are portrayed as forming part of an elite who possess privileged knowledge of art. The genre of gallery paintings had by that time become a medium to accentuate the notion that the powers of discernment associated with connoisseurship are socially superior to or more desirable than other forms of knowing. The :File:Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg - Interior of an Imaginary Picture Gallery.jpg|Interior of an Imaginary Picture Gallery dated to 1666 falls into the category of allegorical picture galleries, which can be considered a sub-category of the imaginary art gallery type. This composition depicts a large imaginary gallery in which are present a number of persons admiring and scrutinizing artworks and, on the right hand side, figures representing gods and allegorical figures. The painting is a collaboration with each of the individual painters whose work is depicted in the painting and have signed their own work: Theodoor Boeyermans, Pieter Boel, Jan Cossiers, Cornelis de Heem, Robert van den Hoecke, Philips Augustijn Immenraet, Jacob Jordaens, Pieter Thijs, Lucas van Uden and the monogrammists missed PB and PVI or PVH. Van Ehrenberg painted the architecture as well as the ceiling . The figures are probably by Charles Emmanuel Biset. Other such collaborations between multiple Antwerp painters on picture gallery paintings are recorded. Another example is Jacob de Formentrou’s Cabinet of pictures, part of the collection of the Royal Collection. Such paintings can be read as a reference to connoisseurship, and in particular the connoisseur's activity of evaluating the authorship of paintings based on stylistic characteristics. It can also be regarded as a carefully crafted advertisement of the present talent and past legacy of the Antwerp school of painting.
