Attributed to The Master of the Small Trades, active, probably in Rome, in the middle of the 17th Century

The identity of the painter known as The Master of the Small Trades remains unknown, although there is growing support for the idea first proposed by Thomas Kren in 1982 that the group of works now attributed to him were painted in Rome in the late 1640s by the young Johannes Lingelbach ("Johannes Lingelbach in Rome", in The J. Getty Museum Journal, vol. X, 1982, pp. 45-62).  The original group of three paintings given to the Master by Kren are all in Rome, Palazzo Corsini, and were all formerly given to Pieter van Laer.  A year after Kren's essay, Laura Laureati proposed the addition of a further fourteen works to his oeuvre (see L. Laureati, "The Master of the Small Trades or the young Lingelbach?", in I Bamboccianti, Rome 1983, pp. 250-57), although she rightly points out that there is still no conclusive evidence to fully associate these works with Lingelbach.