A Hermit Reading

At the bottom right this panel carries the inscription G. Dow 1661. The Louvre does not trust it. The signature and date sit on a strip of wood added in the 18th century, when someone enlarged the picture, and the museum dates the painting itself to about 1645.

Whoever enlarged it had to carry on what was already there. The bare dead tree behind the hermit belongs to the original picture, but its trunk was extended into the new strip. Dead wood was a familiar reminder of the vanity of the world, and an old man reading alone also recalled Saint Jerome, the scholar saint who withdrew into the desert. The hood of his habit marks him as a Christian hermit.

A very similar version hangs in the museum at Brunswick in Germany, without the hood. It too was once given to Dou, and it is now attributed to Dominicus van Tol, one of the Leiden painters who imitated him. The Louvre's panel came in 1869 with the bequest of Louis La Caze, a Paris doctor and collector.