Peasant Family in a Cottage Interior

Van Ostade signed and dated this panel in 1661, and in the same year he painted a second peasant family indoors, almost the same size. The two were never an exact pair, but they were treated as companions and listed one after the other in the early literature, and both seem to have passed through the Wassenaer Obdam family in The Hague. This one probably went from Count Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam to his brother Unico Willem, a diplomat and amateur composer. His six Concerti Armonici were printed in The Hague in 1740 without his name and were long credited to others, Pergolesi above all, until research published in 1980 proved them his. After his death the panel was lot 1 at the family's sale in Amsterdam in 1769.

Inside the cottage an old woman holds a baby on her lap by the hearth, a man sits at a small table, and a little girl holds something up to a dog standing on its hind legs while another child watches from the window. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, Boston collectors of Dutch art, gave it to the museum in 2021.