While alchemical emblems have frequently been mined by historians of science for their intriguing symbolic meanings, art-historical scholarship has long minimized naturalistic images of alchemy such as Wijck’s, owing in part to a belief in genre painting's essential (and restrictive) conventionality. Alchemy's rehabilitation in the history of science over the last several decades has been accompanied by the use of laboratory pictures primarily as illustrations. They often appear as evidence of a frustrating gap between alchemy's real practices as a serious experimental discipline and the popularity of images showing alchemists as dupes or buffoons. But this approach must be refreshed by reflection on the potent social role of art—and its power in modeling reception and societal norms. Despite the existence of satirical alchemical scenes, alchemy's consumers evidently took it seriously, and in turn its representation is worthy of sustained and serious consideration.

The high volume of alchemical images produced during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries speaks on the one hand to the ubiquity of alchemy itself: we can assume that the buyers of these pictures recognized them for what they were, even if some lacked sophisticated knowledge of pictured procedures and tools. But these images also speak to increasing interest in the practitioners of natural philosophy and emerging science, a desire to step into these imagined laboratories and gain a degree of access to the intriguing work going on within. Alchemy and other emerging empirical disciplines were viewed with skepticism and doubt, but also with excitement and curiosity.