A Boy with a Mousetrap

Van der Werff painted this panel, barely 19 centimetres tall, around 1678 or 1679, when he was about 20. A boy leans in a dark window with a mousetrap and a dead mouse. Instead of a small hunter's triumph, he lifts his chin and gazes off into a daydream. Dutch viewers knew the mouse and the trap from their poets, above all Jacob Cats, whose popular emblem books paired pictures with lessons on behaviour. The trap stood for the price of overindulgence, and in love poetry for being caught by love, dreamy and blind to the world. His clothes mix periods, an old-fashioned doublet under a feathered hat and a big hair bow in the style of the late 1670s. The picture once had a companion, a boy putting a bird into a cage, sold with it in Paris in 1772 and now lost.