Sleeping Man Having his Pockets Picked

A handwritten label on the back of this panel reads No. 915, Nicolas Maes, P. Eugene. P. Eugene is Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general who led the Habsburg armies against the Ottomans and the French and filled his palaces in Vienna with paintings. After his death in 1736 his pictures probably went to his niece, who sold them, and this one turned up in England. From 1855 it hung at Penrhyn Castle in North Wales, bought for Edward Douglas-Pennant, later Lord Penrhyn, whose family owned the great slate quarry nearby, and it stayed with his descendants for nearly 150 years. In 2002 Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors from Marblehead near Boston, bought it, and in 2020 they gave it to the museum.

Maes painted it around 1656. A man has dozed off at a table, with a stoneware jug, a glass and a long clay pipe in front of him. Behind his chair a young woman raises a finger to ask us for silence while she picks his pocket. Her jacket, with gold brocade and fur cuffs, is far too fine for a common thief, and the museum suggests the theft is meant to teach the drinker and smoker a lesson in moderation.