A Nurse and a Child in an Elegant Foyer

1663

Jacob Ochtervelt

Artist, Dutch, 1634 - 1682

A child and woman stand at the open door of an entryway with black and white marble floors, as the child drops a coin into the hat of a disheveled boy accompanied by a nursing mother across the threshold in this vertical painting. Beyond the entryway, a man and woman look on from a room with a landscape painting hanging over a tall mantle. All the people have pale skin. The child standing with the woman inside, near the door, looks at us with gray eyes. Blond ringlets frame a round face with full cheeks, a snub nose, and parted coral-red lips. The ringlets are tied with butter-yellow ribbons and the rest of the head is covered with a white cap. The child’s garment has a wide, flaring, flat collar, a tight-fitting bodice, and a flaring, floor-length skirt. Pale plum-purple, puffy sleeves are tied with pale yellow and azure-blue ribbons, and a cape of the same fabric lined with pale grass-green falls from the shoulders. A medallion hangs from a thick gold chain looped over the child’s right shoulder, to our left, across to the opposite hip. The child touches the hand of the woman standing behind with one hand, to our right, and drops a silver coin into the proffered hat with the other. The woman’s body faces us but she turns her oval-shaped face to look down at the boy holding out his hat. She wears a scarlet-red, long-sleeved bodice with a wide, white collar over her chest. A taupe-brown apron covers her dark skirt and her bonnet is long on the sides, draping to brush her shoulders. She rests her right hand, to our left, on her stomach and touches the fingertips of the child in front of her with the other. Near the lower right corner of the painting, a small white dog with ginger-brown spots stands on the black and white marble floor, looking up toward the exchange. Light pours into the entryway through the open door and a transom window above it. The walls are light gray and the doorways are surrounded with darker gray molding. A painting of a landscape hangs above the doorway leading to the room beyond. The man and woman there look at us from in front of a mantle that is taller than the woman who stands next to the man, who is seated. The woman’s hair is pulled back under a cap, and she wears a silver-gray dress lined with a wide band of white fur. She holds one hand to her waist and gestures toward the foyer with the other. The man wears a black suit with a wide, flat collar. The floor in this room is a checkerboard pattern of white and brick-red  squares, and sky-blue panels with gilded leafy designs cover part of the walls. A carved stone cherub like a small, chubby child, stands on the mantle to our left, next to the landscape painting there. Back in the entryway, across the threshold, the boy steps with one foot onto the floor of the foyer as he holds out his frayed, brimmed hat. He has short-cropped blond hair and wears a mustard-yellow shirt with tattered brown pants. The nursing woman stands next to the door, out of sight of the people inside, holding a baby to one round breast. The boy and woman’s faces, necks, and hands are noticeably tanned, almost orange. Two small children huddle, almost out of sight, in the narrow space between the boy and the left edge of the painting. They look down onto a few light tan disks, perhaps coins, on the step in front of them. In the distance beyond the family are a few trees and buildings beneath a vibrant blue sky with puffy white clouds. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “J. Ochtervelt f. 1663.”

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A Nurse and a Child in an Elegant Foyer, signed and dated 1663, represents Jacob Ochtervelt at his artistic height. It depicts a young boy about three years old offering alms to a family of beggars. The household’s maid tenderly holds his hand while his parents, visible through the open doorway, proudly observe their son’s charity—a virtue taught in the home and of great importance to the Dutch. The beggar boy sets his foot cautiously on the hall floor to receive a coin while his mother holds a nursing infant to her breast. Because the patrician boy is still so young he wears his hair in long curls and is outfitted in a freshly ironed white dress, as was common for boys until the age of around seven. Ochtervelt masterfully contrasts the privileged world of the aristocratic family with the uncertainties of the life of the poor by differentiating the dark, ragged clothing of the beggars with the splendid marble hallway and luminous attire of the house’s inhabitants.

Throughout his career, Ochtervelt focused on patrician life and leisure—men and women reading and writing letters, eating and drinking, and making music. However, his most innovative scenes were those depicting the interactions between the upper and lower classes at the threshold of an elegant townhouse. These are known as voorhuis (front hall) scenes. A Nurse and a Child in an Elegant Foyer is one of his finest voorhuis paintings, characterized by Ochtervelt’s clarity of light and color, and by his sympathetic rendering of people from all social classes. A native of Rotterdam, Ochtervelt spent the majority of his successful career in that great port city before moving to Amsterdam in 1674, where he lived until his death.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 50


Artwork overview

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Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Thomas Theodore Cremer [1742-1815], Rotterdam; (his estate sale, at his residence by Nozeman, Van der Looy, W. van Leen, and W.A. Netscher, Rotterdam, 16-17 April 1816, 1st day, no. 84); Sérafin Lambert Louis Malfait [1775-1827], Lille. Charles Piérard, Valenciennes; (his estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20-21 March 1860, no. 53). Comte de M*****; (his estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 29 December 1860, no. 23). acquired c. 1982 by private collection, Europe; (sale, Sotheby's, New York, 20 January 2014, no. 38); (Johnny Van Haeften, London); sold 10 September 2015 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2021

  • Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2021, no. 16, repro.

Bibliography

2016

  • Libby, Alexandra. "Jacob Ochtervelt, A Nurse and a Child in the Foyer of an Elegant Townhouse." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 54 (Spring 2016): 20, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right on the floor: J. Ochtervelt f. / 1663

Wikidata ID

Q46625025


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