Playing Putti

In the Mauritshuis this canvas does what it was made to do. It is set into the wall panelling above a door, the place such pictures were painted for, and from below its grey children read as a marble carving.

The museum catalogues it as in the manner of Martinus Josephus Geeraerts, the Antwerp specialist in these painted reliefs, and dates it to about 1740 to 1760 without naming the hand. It came up for sale at Sotheby's in New York in October 1999. The next year Mrs M.A. Stubbé-Butôt gave it to the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, which has lent it to the museum ever since.