The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent an alchemical "Golden Age." During this era, alchemists were engaged in a wide array of commercial enterprises, from mining to dye and pigment manufacture to the production of chemical medicines. Yet despite its past ubiquity and utility, alchemy has since borne negative associations with magic, occultism, delusion, and greed, and alchemical imagery has in turn suffered misinterpretation or obscurity.

Many modern interpretations of alchemical art centralize Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1558 satirical print, The Alchemist, a scene that lampoons vain hopes for transmutated gold; others focus on the mess and disorder of the pictured workshop as signs of alchemy's failures. Yet the alchemical paintings of Thomas Wijck (1616--1677) present a remarkable challenge to narratives of greed and folly. Wijck's painted laboratories model domestic harmony, scholarly study, and expert knowledge of materials. Rather than charlatans or dupes, his alchemists are respectable and scholarly artisans who pursue intellectual and empirical work. In representing alchemists as artisans, Wijck reframes alchemy in the context of the familiar, as well as socially and economically vital, artisanal workshop. His images further present colored powders and raw materials that epitomize desirable and useful alchemical products, particularly pigments and dyes.

Wijck's choice to depict his alchemists as makers of artists' materials, rather than seekers of gold or cures, is a remarkable one. It affirms his subject's utility as a tool for fashioning an artistic identity rooted in curiosity, ingenuity, and transformation. As a painter, and particularly as a painter in oils, Wijck was connected to a legacy of experiment in workshop process, as well as concerns for mimesis, naturalism, and material change. While the work of alchemists and painters might be considered artisanal, both alchemists and artists claimed a special status owing to their creative powers. Alchemy shared deeper connections (and rivalries) with art-making, centering on the replication of nature. Wijck's formation of an artistic and professional identity around alchemical themes indicates his desire to explore this curious territory, and ultimately to demonstrate art's superior claims to knowledge of the natural world.