Peasant Girl Catching a Flea

In the summer of 1929 the British ambassador to Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, bought two pictures from a dealer in Venice, this girl and a companion canvas of a peasant boy at a market. They went to Berlin and hung in the embassy until 1933, the year Hitler came to power and Rumbold, whose reports to London warned of what the new government intended, left the post. His son later wrote to the museum that the pair then hung in London until the war, when they were put into storage, and they were sold at Christie's in 1945. Boston bought both the following year.

Piazzetta painted the girl in Venice around 1715, in his early thirties. A woman searching her clothes for fleas was a subject his teacher in Bologna, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, had made his own a few years before. The museum points to the way Piazzetta, the son of a woodcarver, built up his figures with light and shadow until they have the weight of sculpture.