Historians of early modern art collecting have traditionally emphasized the lack of intellectual engagement with the arts in Poland–Lithuania. This article, instead, argues that the absence of local art theory does not entail a lack of critical consideration of artefacts. In so doing, it examines the art collections of the Vasa rulers as cultural forms that unveil mutually transformative interactions between foreign discourse on art and its local manifestations. Connoisseurship in Poland–Lithuania resulted from a constant clash between practitioners of art collecting at court and detractors of this practice among the gentry. From this tension a specific set of conditions emerges where appreciation of connoisseurship and hostility to it went hand in hand, together shaping local art collecting as the effect of Polish–Lithuanian culture of participatory politics.