Gabriel Metsu Leiden 1629 - 1669 Amsterdam

Charles T. Yerkes, Chicago, acquired after 1893 and before 1904;
By whose executor sold, New York, American Art Association, January 22, 1910, lot 97, where purchased by Kleinberger for $2,800;
With Kleinberger, Paris, until at least 1911.

F.W. Robinson, Gabriel Metsu (1610-1667), A Study of His Place in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age, New York 1974, p. 45, reproduced p. 160, plate 101.

One of Metsu's recurring themes is the depiction of women engaged in domestic duties.  In this he was surely influenced, as Frank Robinson and others have noted (see Literature), by his Leiden forbear Gerard Dou.  In this respect Metsu had much in common with artists both in Leiden and in other Dutch cities.  Metsu's style was more painterly and markedly less miniaturizing than that of Dou, or of Dou's pupil of Metsu's generation, Frans van Mieris. Metsu's style merits comparison with contemporaries such as Gerard Ter Borch, Jan Steen and Adriaen van Ostade, although in many respects - such as the scale of his pictures - he remained a clear adherent of the Leiden school. By the time he painted this picture, Metsu had settled in Amsterdam, but this move does not seem to have diluted the influence of his native city upon his work, and on the evidence of his few dated paintings, it did not do so until well into the 1660s.

We are grateful to Dr. Adriaan Waiboer for confirming the attribution, and for suggesting a date of circa 1657, at the start of Metsu's Amsterdam period.  Frank Robinson does not specify a date, but his comparisons imply a slightly later dating than this.