Children Bathing

Dutch buyers in the 1650s knew their emblem books, small volumes pairing a picture with a moral verse, and the Louvre reads this bathing scene through them. A crowd of boys clambers in and out of a small boat, with a dog on board and a windmill on the far bank. Look at the edges. One boy leans on a floating log, trusting his weight to something that could roll at any moment, an image of a life built on uncertain foundations. Another tumbles backwards into the water, the swimmer too sure of his own skill. The Louvre keeps the painting under the name of Nicolaes Maes and dates it to about 1655 to 1660. That attribution has often been questioned, and the museum itself finds a recent proposal more convincing, Justus de Gelder, a relative of Maes.