Isaack Koedijck Amsterdam 1617/18 - 1668

Jonkheer A. van Panhuijs, Slot Nienoort , near Leek, Groningen, the Netherlands, until circa 1927;
Dr. Eduard Beith, London, 1938;
Bought by the late husband of the present owner in the early 1970s;
By whom offered, London, Sotheby's, 24 March 1966, lot 66 (unsold).

C. Hofstede de Groot, `Die Koedijck-Rätsel und ihre Lösung', in Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, vol. XXIV, 1903, p. 46, reproduced p. 45;
C. Hofstede de Groot, in Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstag, 1927, p. 189;
E. Plietzsch, Höllandische und Flämische Maler des XVII. Jahr., Leipzig 1960, p. 79, reproduced plate 130;
P.C. Sutton, in Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, exhibition catalogue, London and Philadelphia 1984, p. 230, under no. 59 ("three extant versions").

This picture has traditionally been entitled Het Leege Wijnglas (The Empty wineglass).  Koedijck was one of the pioneers of the depiction of interior space in Dutch genre painting, and his experiments in it in the second half of the 1640s were taken a stage further by Nicolaes Maes and Pieter de Hooch a decade later.

Another very similar version is known, and was last sold in these Rooms on 6th July 1994.  The two pictures are very similar, and the principal difference between them is that in the other version the loop of cord running from the rafter to the wall by the door is virtually invisible.  There are other very minor changes, for example in the depiction of shadows.  Because the two works, and a likely third version, are so similar, they have often been confused; nonetheless every effort has been taken to establish the correct provenance and literature in this case.