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拍品專文
This painting exemplifies the seductively refined pictorial language and remarkable technique that made Gerrit Dou – much like his master, Rembrandt – one of the most successful Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. Both in his own lifetime and in the centuries that followed, Dou enjoyed the favour of artists and connoisseurs alike and his paintings commanded princely sums.
Some thirty-five years after a visit to the artist’s studio, the painter Joachim von Sandrart described in his Teutsche Academie (1675) how Dou took days to paint the minutest detail and, consequently, required eyeglasses from the age of thirty. Similarly, the painter and theorist Philips Angel praised Dou’s combination of ‘neatness’ and a ‘curious looseness’ in his Lof der Schilder-konst (‘Praise of the Art of Painting') of 1641. For their part, Dou’s patrons – including Cosimo III de’ Medici, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria and the Dutch States General, who acquired three paintings as gifts for Charles II upon his accession to the English throne in 1660 – often paid extraordinary amounts for his painstakingly executed works. Sandrart set the cost of Dou’s small paintings at between 600 and 1000 guilders apiece (several times what a skilled craftsman could expect to earn annually), while Angel relayed how Pieter Spiering, envoy of the Swedish crown to The Hague from 1634 to 1652, paid 500 guilders annually simply for the right of first refusal of his paintings.
Depictions of women combing children’s hair were especially popular representations of maternal duties in Dutch seventeenth-century art. As Wayne Franits has proposed, the task was not only important cosmetically but held hygienic benefits as well (Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Cambridge and New York, 1993, p. 124). Combs were used to delouse people of all ages. Such painted depictions of everyday life contained within them a complex pedagogical symbolism that would not have been lost on knowing contemporary viewers. With their focus on the proper rearing of children (among Dou’s favourite themes), these paintings are illustrations of domestic virtue. Ronni Baer, for example, has pointed out how, in his well-read Sinnepoppen of 1614, the great Dutch poet Roemer Visscher included an emblem of a comb (fig. 1), above which is written the Latin motto ‘Purgat et ornat’ (‘it cleanses and beautifies’; see Baer, op. cit., p. 49.2). Similarly, the generation younger Jacob Cats described combs as instruments that purify both the body and spirit on a daily basis in his Spiegel van den ouden en nieuwen Tyt, first published in 1632. In Cats’s time, there was a widespread belief that equated one’s well-groomed external appearance with inner virtue. Whereas most depictions of this theme, like that painted by Caspar Netscher in 1669 (fig. 2), depict a young woman combing a child’s hair, Dou instead shows an elderly woman undertaking this essential task. Elizabeth Honig has suggested that Dou’s choice to have an aged woman groom the child emphasises the aging process and the idea of vanitas (op. cit.), though, as Baer has recently noted (private communication, 19 May 2025), this same idea appears in paintings like the Old woman cutting bread (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), which have no evident connection to the vanitas theme. The seated young boy holds what appears to be a small, round and flat object in his upraised hand. Having recently had the opportunity to study the painting firsthand, Baer has suggested it may be the other button to his overalls (private communication, 19 May 2025).
Much like the toys strewn across the floor in Netscher’s painting, the boy blowing up the pig’s bladder in the background of Dou’s painting may be taken as a symbol of the foolishness and frivolity of playthings (for further discussion of this, see Franits, op. cit., p. 126). The cultivation of animals required to produce the pig's bladder may equally have conjured in contemporary viewers’ minds a pedagogical metaphor with child rearing and, as Baer has posited, the ‘laying in of provisions for the approaching winter that implies the mother’s foresight’ (op. cit., p. 49.3). The detail may then be understood as a complement to the gathered wood and wheelbarrow with humble vegetables at lower right.
Baer (op. cit., pp. 49.1-49.2), who knew of this painting only from photographs at the time of her dissertation, perceptively drew a comparison between its composition and concept of space and that of the Woman in Prayer at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (fig. 3), a work that, like the present painting, can be dated to the second half of the 1640s. She further described a thematically comparable painting of 1648 by Quiringh van Brekelenkam (fig. 4), which she recognised as ‘a reprise’ of Dou’s composition (op. cit.). More recently, Baer has pointed out that the still-life elements at extreme lower right – faggots tied with a red string, single wooden clog and earthenware pot with broken lid – are very close to those in one of Dou’s most charming creations, the Dog at rest of 1650 (Promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The earthenware pot appears to be identical in both images and must have been based on an actual example.
When John Smith described this painting in his Catalogue Raisonné (1829), his appraisal of it as ‘an exquisitely painted picture’ (op. cit.) channelled the high regard in which it was held, then as today. By the time of writing, the painting had been a fixture of the Bavarian Royal Collections for over half a century and, while it cannot be established with certitude, quite possibly for a length of time before then. The existence of no fewer than three versions of this composition further emphasises its appeal. These include a replica formerly in the Cook collection, Richmond (sold Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, lot 81); a composition with differing details (sold Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 2 December 1899, lot 25); and a copy recorded in the collection of P. Friedrichs in Brilon in 1984.
We are grateful to Dr. Ronni Baer for sharing her perceptive comments on the painting after first-hand inspection of the work.
Some thirty-five years after a visit to the artist’s studio, the painter Joachim von Sandrart described in his Teutsche Academie (1675) how Dou took days to paint the minutest detail and, consequently, required eyeglasses from the age of thirty. Similarly, the painter and theorist Philips Angel praised Dou’s combination of ‘neatness’ and a ‘curious looseness’ in his Lof der Schilder-konst (‘Praise of the Art of Painting') of 1641. For their part, Dou’s patrons – including Cosimo III de’ Medici, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria and the Dutch States General, who acquired three paintings as gifts for Charles II upon his accession to the English throne in 1660 – often paid extraordinary amounts for his painstakingly executed works. Sandrart set the cost of Dou’s small paintings at between 600 and 1000 guilders apiece (several times what a skilled craftsman could expect to earn annually), while Angel relayed how Pieter Spiering, envoy of the Swedish crown to The Hague from 1634 to 1652, paid 500 guilders annually simply for the right of first refusal of his paintings.
Depictions of women combing children’s hair were especially popular representations of maternal duties in Dutch seventeenth-century art. As Wayne Franits has proposed, the task was not only important cosmetically but held hygienic benefits as well (Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Cambridge and New York, 1993, p. 124). Combs were used to delouse people of all ages. Such painted depictions of everyday life contained within them a complex pedagogical symbolism that would not have been lost on knowing contemporary viewers. With their focus on the proper rearing of children (among Dou’s favourite themes), these paintings are illustrations of domestic virtue. Ronni Baer, for example, has pointed out how, in his well-read Sinnepoppen of 1614, the great Dutch poet Roemer Visscher included an emblem of a comb (fig. 1), above which is written the Latin motto ‘Purgat et ornat’ (‘it cleanses and beautifies’; see Baer, op. cit., p. 49.2). Similarly, the generation younger Jacob Cats described combs as instruments that purify both the body and spirit on a daily basis in his Spiegel van den ouden en nieuwen Tyt, first published in 1632. In Cats’s time, there was a widespread belief that equated one’s well-groomed external appearance with inner virtue. Whereas most depictions of this theme, like that painted by Caspar Netscher in 1669 (fig. 2), depict a young woman combing a child’s hair, Dou instead shows an elderly woman undertaking this essential task. Elizabeth Honig has suggested that Dou’s choice to have an aged woman groom the child emphasises the aging process and the idea of vanitas (op. cit.), though, as Baer has recently noted (private communication, 19 May 2025), this same idea appears in paintings like the Old woman cutting bread (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), which have no evident connection to the vanitas theme. The seated young boy holds what appears to be a small, round and flat object in his upraised hand. Having recently had the opportunity to study the painting firsthand, Baer has suggested it may be the other button to his overalls (private communication, 19 May 2025).
Much like the toys strewn across the floor in Netscher’s painting, the boy blowing up the pig’s bladder in the background of Dou’s painting may be taken as a symbol of the foolishness and frivolity of playthings (for further discussion of this, see Franits, op. cit., p. 126). The cultivation of animals required to produce the pig's bladder may equally have conjured in contemporary viewers’ minds a pedagogical metaphor with child rearing and, as Baer has posited, the ‘laying in of provisions for the approaching winter that implies the mother’s foresight’ (op. cit., p. 49.3). The detail may then be understood as a complement to the gathered wood and wheelbarrow with humble vegetables at lower right.
Baer (op. cit., pp. 49.1-49.2), who knew of this painting only from photographs at the time of her dissertation, perceptively drew a comparison between its composition and concept of space and that of the Woman in Prayer at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (fig. 3), a work that, like the present painting, can be dated to the second half of the 1640s. She further described a thematically comparable painting of 1648 by Quiringh van Brekelenkam (fig. 4), which she recognised as ‘a reprise’ of Dou’s composition (op. cit.). More recently, Baer has pointed out that the still-life elements at extreme lower right – faggots tied with a red string, single wooden clog and earthenware pot with broken lid – are very close to those in one of Dou’s most charming creations, the Dog at rest of 1650 (Promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The earthenware pot appears to be identical in both images and must have been based on an actual example.
When John Smith described this painting in his Catalogue Raisonné (1829), his appraisal of it as ‘an exquisitely painted picture’ (op. cit.) channelled the high regard in which it was held, then as today. By the time of writing, the painting had been a fixture of the Bavarian Royal Collections for over half a century and, while it cannot be established with certitude, quite possibly for a length of time before then. The existence of no fewer than three versions of this composition further emphasises its appeal. These include a replica formerly in the Cook collection, Richmond (sold Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, lot 81); a composition with differing details (sold Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 2 December 1899, lot 25); and a copy recorded in the collection of P. Friedrichs in Brilon in 1984.
We are grateful to Dr. Ronni Baer for sharing her perceptive comments on the painting after first-hand inspection of the work.