Peasant Family in an Interior

On 14 March 1914 this canvas turned up at the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris auction house, and nobody had known it existed. The Louvre wanted it but had no funds that day, and the bidding stopped at 13,500 francs. A year later, with France at war, it was bought from the dealer for 50,000 francs out of a bequest left by the engineer Arthur Pernolet. The historian Jacques Thuillier wrote that in wartime the purchase must have looked insane. It is the largest of the Le Nain peasant scenes. The museum gives it to Louis Le Nain, names his brother Antoine only with a question mark, and dates it to around 1642. The old woman holds a jug and a glass of red wine, and some scholars have wondered whether she is a visitor from a richer household on an errand of charity, a reading the Louvre finds fragile.