Perspective Fantasy of a Palace, with Elegant Figures (oil on panel)

A view through a colonnaded portico in the courtyard of a palace, with elegantly dressed figures in the foreground, as well as a serving boy, two dogs, a monkey perched on the base of a column, and a peacock strutting in the middle ground. The plunging perspective leads the eye through the marbled colonnade, to a grand edifice with an archway in the background and a garden beyond that. Other figures can be seen in the courtyard between the portico and the palace in the middle ground and to the right of the composition. The painting is thought to have been based on a print by the sixteenth-century artist Hans Vredeman de Vries.