Children with a cage

The present painting, which has been unavailable to scholars for almost seventy years and has been known only from an old photograph, is a reduced version, with significant differences, of a painting in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (Inv. no. 2544; acquired in 1966); the Karlsruhe painting has been traditionally attributed to Louis Le Nain, though more recently it has been given to Matthieu Le Nain (by Pierre Rosenberg). The Karlsruhe canvas (which measures 56.5x44cm) was engraved in the 18th century when it was in the collection of a celebrated amateur, the Chevalier de Damery. Unlike the present version, the children in the Karlsruhe picture play out-of-doors, in front of an open-air barn and beneath a beautiful blue sky; the background of the present painting is harder to interpret, and may be unfinished, but appears to represent an interior. Furthermore, the foreground still life in the present lot is more extensive and fully developed than in the Karlsruhe painting.

A side-by-side comparison of the two versions of the subject (made in Karlsruhe in November 1999) reveals many differences in the palatte and handling of the two paintings and suggests that they were not executed by the same hand; we are grateful to Dietmar Ludke for making the comparison possible.