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Lot Essay
Eberhard Caspersen Keilhau was born in Helsignör, Denmark, the son of a German painter from Meissen, who was working in the court of Christian IV. After six years of apprenticeship under the Copenhagen court painter, Maarten van Steenwinckel (1595-1646), Keil was able, through his Dutch mother's contacts, to gain a position in Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam, where he remained for two years (1642-4). His encounter with Rembrandt would shape much of his early technique. Keil subsequently worked for the prominent dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh for three years and then ran his own shop for four years before traveling to Italy. He arrived in Venice in 1651, moved to Bergamo in 1654 for a number of months, and sojourned briefly in Milan before setting out for Rome. There, he adopted a new style that reflected his exposure to the work of Bernardo Strozzi, Domenico Fetti and Giovanni Battista Langetti. In 1657, despite the plague which had infested the city since the previous summer, Keil settled definitively in Rome, marrying and converting to Catholicism.
Minna Heimbürger identifies the subject of this painting as an Allegory of Hearing and Sight, dating it to the artist’s Roman period (op. cit.). She notes that during these years Keil tended to employ a rather limited number of motifs for his genre pieces, most of which were intended to be read as allegorical allusions to themes such as the seasons, the elements or, as here, to the senses (ibid.). In this period, Keil consistently presented his genre subjects in novel ways – even when reusing favored figures or still-life elements, he would consistently invigorate this with new life and purpose, as is the case with the fruit basket behind the boy at left, which may have been invented for a painting devoted to one of the seasons. As Frank Robinson has noted (op. cit.), this painting relates compositionally to three other works, the Group of Four Peasants (The Ringling, Sarasota), and the pendant paintings, Young boy selling vegetables and Young boy selling kindling wood (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Minna Heimbürger identifies the subject of this painting as an Allegory of Hearing and Sight, dating it to the artist’s Roman period (op. cit.). She notes that during these years Keil tended to employ a rather limited number of motifs for his genre pieces, most of which were intended to be read as allegorical allusions to themes such as the seasons, the elements or, as here, to the senses (ibid.). In this period, Keil consistently presented his genre subjects in novel ways – even when reusing favored figures or still-life elements, he would consistently invigorate this with new life and purpose, as is the case with the fruit basket behind the boy at left, which may have been invented for a painting devoted to one of the seasons. As Frank Robinson has noted (op. cit.), this painting relates compositionally to three other works, the Group of Four Peasants (The Ringling, Sarasota), and the pendant paintings, Young boy selling vegetables and Young boy selling kindling wood (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).