Interior with Painter, Woman Reading and Maid Sweeping, ca. 1665 – 1670

About the Work

A quiet interior: a maid sweeps the floor while the lady of the house sits at a table, perhaps immersed in a songbook. Her elegantly dressed husband stands in the adjacent room, a palette in his right hand. The latter figure may be a self-portrait of the painter Pieter Janssens Elinga, who is known to have been left-handed. His chief concern in this work, however, was the interplay of light and shade, the reflections, perspectives and outlooks – even at the cost of a truthful depiction: geometrically laid marble floors were rare in bourgeois households in Holland.