Old Woman Cutting Bread

In February 1937 a Berlin dealer, Eduard Plietzsch, wrote to Ernst Buchner, director of the Bavarian state picture collections, to confirm a trade. Plietzsch would hand over three German altarpiece panels. In return he would receive this small Dou from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, along with a little landscape by Jan Brueghel the Elder. In those years Buchner let at least 74 Dutch paintings leave the museum in exchange for German art. The deal was dated 3 March. By April another Berlin dealer, Heinz Steinmeyer, was offering the Dou for sale, and later that year it went to a private collector. That family kept it until the Museum of Fine Arts bought it in 2003.

Before Munich it had belonged to princes. Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, a German ruler who assembled about 350 paintings in Düsseldorf, owned it, and the inventory taken at his death described an old woman cutting bread, a young boy with a spoon, a small child at the table and a ham. His heirs moved the collection to Mannheim, where an inventory of 1730 noticed that a boy is holding a candle. In 1836 the picture went on show in the new Pinakothek in Munich, and it stayed there for a century.