A Useless Moral Lesson

A fashionable young woman sits by a birdcage, and she has almost let the little bird escape. Beside her an old woman raises one finger in warning and lectures her about the dangers of love. The girl is hardly listening, which is where the title comes from. No one in the 17th century needed the bird explained. It was a familiar sign of a young woman's virginity.

Schalcken painted this small panel as one of a pair, and its partner, The Doctor's Examination, shows what came of ignoring the lesson. The two have been together since at least 1733, when they belonged to Prince William IV of Orange. They passed to his son William V, spent the French years from 1795 to 1815 in Paris, and have been in the Mauritshuis since 1822.