A Writer Trimming his Pen

A goose quill did not stay sharp for long. Anyone writing letters in 1784 stopped every so often to recut the point with a small blade, which is where the word penknife comes from. That ordinary chore is the whole subject of this little panel by Jan Ekels the Younger. The writer sits with his back to us in his shirtsleeves, his brown coat thrown over the other chair, and we see his face only in the mirror on the wall, bent over the quill. An inkstand with more pens waits on the green tablecloth. Ekels signed and dated the picture high up in the corner, and the whole panel is only about 27 centimetres tall. It came to the Rijksmuseum in 1880 in the bequest of an Amsterdam collector, Van de Poll.