The Weaver is a great example of Mellery’s moody realism. Portraying the inner life of things, the meditative silence, achieved through the use of a limited palette and subdued coloring, Mellery veils the mundane of this storefront as mysterious and poetic. The artist, peaking through the window from the outside, hints at a contemporary version of the Arnolfini portrait. The Arnolfinis were a wealthy Italian family, trading luxury fabrics in Bruges. The Italians, with their newer, larger galleys, had opened up the direct sea route through the Straits of Gibraltar and up the French coast to Flanders. This resulted in Bruges becoming a leading international port and bankers flocked to Flanders. Unfortunately, it was a boom that could not be sustained. As with its rise, numerous factors played a role in its fall. By the early fifteenth century, the industry had declined to a fraction of its former glory bringing the golden era of Flemish supremacy in cloth to an end.

Could the weaver and his family be locals representing the past, since the wool market and weaving industry were at the center of Bruges’s prosperity in the time of Jan van Eyck? Referencing the long-lost mercantile profession in the 1880s, Mellery exudes the dissipation of bygone social rigidity, when wealth was reserved for those who were born into it, transported into a present-day household. By making the weavers the protagonists, Mellery’s Flanders conveys the inverse of the Arnolfini family portrait. Like it's fifteenth century predecessor, Flemish Interior shows the artist's contemporaries engaged in a current interior, with both Mellery and Van Eyk as the perfect eye-witnesses at the center of it all.

A print of the child holding a toy in the walker after the drawing shows us the contraption to keep the youngster out of trouble. Baby walkers were known as early as the fifteenth century in the Low Countries, allowing mothers to do their work in the home. An illumination in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a Dutch manuscript from c. 1440 in the Morgan Museum & Library, New York, depicts the infant Jesus in a wooden walker with the Holy Family at work. Although it is unknown if Mellery was familiar with the Arnolfini portrait or medieval representations, Flemish Interior reminds us of the Child Jesus with the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph, the archetypal model for Christian families.