Lot Essay
To be compared with the picture of the same subject, present whereabouts unknown (recorded in the RKD). In its triangular composition, with the architecture on the right and the sequence of figures descending to the lower left, the present lot recalls the picture, signed and dated 1646, in the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The dwarfs are a typical motif in the work of Molenaer, as P.C. Sutton points out in Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 1984, pp.264-265, cat.n.79, plate 21, with ill.