Girl Reading

In 1899 the Mauritshuis bought this small panel from Henry Joseph Pfungst, a collector in London, for 50 pounds, about 600 guilders at the time. The Rembrandt Association, a society founded in 1883 to keep Dutch art in the Netherlands, helped to pay for it.

It shows a girl reading, painted around 1660 on a panel barely 31 centimetres high. Its maker, Claes Hals, a son of Frans Hals, worked in Haarlem and painted everyday scenes and landscapes more often than portraits. He signed it with his initials, CH, on the stool at the left.