Portrait of a child in a black dress with a white lace collar and bonnet, holding a fan

Aelbert Cuyp, a Dutch artist perhaps best known for his representations of cattle and horses in pastoral landscapes, actually began his career in a workshop specializing in portraiture and was the son of a portraitist, Jacob Cuyp. There are no known portraits by the artist dated earlier than 1646, the year to which we can date a pair of pendant portrait drawings now in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin, and we can attribute to him relatively few half-length painted portraits in total. A work such as the present portrait of a child, therefore, is rare within his oeuvre. The strong lighting as well as the girl's elegantly detailed costume recall portraits by Paulus Lesire and Ferdinand Bol, both of whom studied with Jacob Cuyp before adopting Rembrandt's manner of painting.