Two Tax Gatherers - about 1540

By Marinus van Reymerswaele (active 1535 – 1545)

This painting shows two men who had the job of collecting taxes in a small town. This job would have made them very unpopular and this probably explains why the artist has made them look quite ugly! Their faces aren’t based on real people, instead they are caricatures, which means that they are exaggerated versions of something real. They also wear ridiculous clothes and fancy hats that would have been unfashionable at the time and remind us that we’re not supposed to like these characters!

They certainly don’t look like very nice people! The man on the left is hunched and unsmiling as he writes down the taxes collected in a book, his pen scratching across the paper. The man on the right is grabbing at the pile of money with a hand that looks like an animal’s claw and his eyes look a bit shifty! Their office is cluttered with various objects including an oval box for holding documents in the top left-hand corner, a brass candlestick and a pen case and ink well at the front.

Can you imagine the sounds of the piles of coins crashing down? What do you think the tax collectors’ voices might sound like?

_{Oil on oak
The National Gallery, London}

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