Interior, called "Rubens' salon"

Interior, called Rubens' Salon, painted around 1620 and now at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, depicts an elaborate room hung with paintings that has been associated, perhaps fancifully, with the great house that Rubens built for himself in Antwerp. Rubens' house on the Wapper was one of the architectural wonders of early seventeenth-century Antwerp — an Italianate palazzo with a sculpture garden, studio, and reception rooms whose walls were hung with his own paintings and his collection of antiquities. Whether Francken directly depicts Rubens' actual interior or constructs an idealised collector's room associated with his colleague and rival is uncertain, but the association is telling: Rubens was the dominant presence in Antwerp painting at this moment, and his salon was the ideal against which all collecting ambitions were measured. Francken and Rubens collaborated on several works, and Francken's cabinet paintings sometimes include miniaturised copies of Rubens' compositions, creating a complex dialogue between the two artists.

The interior is rendered with careful spatial recession: the floor tiles provide a perspective grid, and the walls are hung from dado to cornice in the dense, two-row hanging typical of early modern collections. Francken differentiates each depicted painting through distinct palettes and subject matter, suggesting identifiable works rather than generic placeholders.