Boy Sleeping in a Barn

A boy has dozed off on a low seat in a barn, arms folded and hat pulled down over his eyes. Most of the panel, though, goes to the vegetables beside him, two big heads of cabbage on the floor and a pumpkin and a red cabbage on a ledge. François Ryckhals painted it in Middelburg in the early 1640s, one of the farm interiors in which he mixed a scene from daily life with a still life.

Look at the lower right for the signature. Ryckhals wrote his name as a monogram, FSRHALS, with several of the letters run together, and misreadings of that monogram led to a number of his still lifes being credited for a long time to Frans Hals the Younger, son of the famous Haarlem portraitist. This panel belongs to the Mauritshuis, which bought it in 1957, and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V.