Flea Hunting in the Candlelight

The flea was an old joke long before Honthorst got hold of it. Since antiquity it stood for sex, the little bloodsucker that goes where a lover only wishes he could, and hunting for one was a well-worn excuse to undress. Honthorst built a candlelit genre scene around that pretext. A procuress, the go-between of a brothel, holds the light while a half-dressed young woman searches her clothes for the flea and smiles out at us. He worked out the composition back in Utrecht around 1621, after his years in Rome. The panel in Basel is not that original, though. It counts as an old copy after Honthorst, dated to 1650, when the painter himself had long since traded these dark taverns for the portrait commissions of princely courts.