Miel, Jan (1599-1663). An old woman combing the hair of...
Miel, Jan (1599-1663). An old woman combing the hair of a girl. Etching, 13,7x20,7 cm., signed "J. Miele fecit" in the plate.
- Trimmed a few mm. outside the platemark.
= On late 17th cent. laid paper. With the collector's mark of Pieter Willem van Doorne (1896-1971) (Lugt 4731) and the museum Boymans van Beuningen (doublure, Lugt 700a). Hollstein 12, only state; De Jongh/ Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life 51 ("Old woman delousing a child", with illustration): "(...) Jan Miel, an Italianate painter from Flanders who spent much of his life in Rome and then Turin. (...) The unsaddled donkey in this attractive etching is part of a composition that can be described as typical of the subject matter favoured by the Bamboccianti, as the illustrators of everyday life in Italy were called. The centrepiece of the scene, which was executed around 1640, is a seated old woman with a pince-nez delousing a child's head. She would not have been to every-one's taste. A donkey was bad enough, but to depict someone killing lice (...) was considered deplorable by many of the artists' contemporaries. Several Italian writers and critics, at any rate, condemned this sort of scene out of hand. Giambattista Passeri speaks of 'abject and repulsive depictions' in his biography of Miel." Rare.
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Miel, Jan (1599-1663). An old woman combing the hair of a girl. Etching, 13,7x20,7 cm., signed "J. Miele fecit" in the plate.
- Trimmed a few mm. outside the platemark.
= On late 17th cent. laid paper. With the collector's mark of Pieter Willem van Doorne (1896-1971) (Lugt 4731) and the museum Boymans van Beuningen (doublure, Lugt 700a). Hollstein 12, only state; De Jongh/ Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life 51 ("Old woman delousing a child", with illustration): "(...) Jan Miel, an Italianate painter from Flanders who spent much of his life in Rome and then Turin. (...) The unsaddled donkey in this attractive etching is part of a composition that can be described as typical of the subject matter favoured by the Bamboccianti, as the illustrators of everyday life in Italy were called. The centrepiece of the scene, which was executed around 1640, is a seated old woman with a pince-nez delousing a child's head. She would not have been to every-one's taste. A donkey was bad enough, but to depict someone killing lice (...) was considered deplorable by many of the artists' contemporaries. Several Italian writers and critics, at any rate, condemned this sort of scene out of hand. Giambattista Passeri speaks of 'abject and repulsive depictions' in his biography of Miel." Rare.
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