Wijck's diverse encounters with alchemy at home in Haarlem, and abroad in Rome, Naples, and London, provided him with a lifetime's worth of sources for his representations of alchemical practice. Yet Wijck's practices within the studio also encompassed materials, habits, and knowledge that were alchemical in nature and that bordered on the investigative processes used by natural philosophers to explore matter. These connections provided him with access to alchemical knowledge that was distinct from the knowledge of his elite curious patrons. Artists and alchemists alike were intimately familiar with seventeenth-century pigments such as mercuric sulfide vermillion, as well as the aqua fortis or “strong water” (nitric acid) used by etchers to “bite” their plates. For their extensive chemical knowledge, artists relied on experiences gained firsthand in the workshop, as well as shared collectively through recipe books and manuals. The raw materials used by painters—oils or binding mediums, pigments, varnishes, solvents—demanded expert skill in their manipulation. Despite clear rhetorical connections between alchemical and artistic transformations, linkages between art and alchemy lie not only in metaphor, but in processes of making.

As I have demonstrated, Wijck presents alchemists as scholar-artisans: respectable members of their communities, heads of households, expert teachers of young apprentices, erudite thinkers, and chemical investigators. The clutter and broken vessels he depicts speak to the real demands of material work and the messy knowledge-seeking that characterizes investigations into nature.