Old Woman Eating Porridge
Details
The story
In August 1684 the clerks drawing up the estate of an Amsterdam man, Jacob Schardinel, listed an old woman eating porridge, by Metsu. The picture still goes by that name. Metsu painted it about 1657, around the time he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam, and it shows a woman in white linen at her table, surrounded by pots and dishes of earthenware.
The panel then spent well over a century with one Amsterdam family. When the collector Antoni Bierens died in 1747 his pictures had to be auctioned, and his family bought most of them back, very probably this one among them. His descendants, by then the Bierens de Haan family, sold it only in 1881.
Eight years later it came up in Paris in the sale of Eugène Secrétan, an industrialist ruined when his attempt to corner the world's copper market collapsed. The London dealers Agnew bought it for Edward Cecil Guinness of the brewing family, later Lord Iveagh. It now belongs to the collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, who live near Boston and have promised it to the Museum of Fine Arts.
