Interior with a Woman Washing her Hands

A young woman washes her hands with water from a silver jug. Behind her, other women are busy with a client, and the Mauritshuis reads the room as an elegant brothel. The museum leaves her gesture open. She may be washing after a customer has left, or washing her hands in innocence, as if the sins around her were not her concern. Van der Neer signed and dated the panel in 1675 on the foot of a column.

Collectors paid well for this kind of polish. The picture fetched 610 guilders at a Hague sale in 1743 and 2,400 at Dordrecht in 1785, and it later belonged to the English collector William Beckford and to the Rothschilds in London. After a London sale in 1937 it went to the Amsterdam banker Fritz Mannheimer, and in 1940, after his death, his collection was sold for the museum Hitler planned in Linz. After the war the Dutch state took it into its care as part of the Netherlands Art Property Collection. It has hung in the Mauritshuis since 1948 and was transferred there in 1960.