A Sleeping Boy and a Man Removing Fleas from Himself

Fleas and lice were part of daily life in 17th-century Europe, and painters of everyday scenes did not look away from them. Gerard ter Borch painted a mother combing lice from her child's hair. Michiel Sweerts, working in Rome in the early 1650s, painted this canvas of a man ridding himself of fleas beside a boy who has fallen asleep. The Mauritshuis owns two pictures by Sweerts on this same unglamorous subject. It bought this one in London in 1901, from the dealers Forbes and Paterson. Sweerts was then only just being rediscovered, after most of the 18th and 19th centuries had forgotten him. Since 2010 the painting has hung in the Gallery Prince Willem V, the Mauritshuis's second venue on the Buitenhof in The Hague.