The Apple Peeler

A mother peels an apple while her small daughter watches, intent. The Kunsthistorisches Museum connects the scene to a moralising epigram of the time that warned parents against granting a child every wish, and warned even more sharply against granting every wish of one's own. Gerard ter Borch painted it around 1660, and it is small, only 36 centimetres high, in the minutely finished manner the Dutch called fine painting. It came to Vienna through the Habsburg family itself. It belonged to Charles of Lorraine, brother of Maria Theresa's husband and for almost 40 years governor of the Austrian Netherlands at Brussels, and it was acquired in 1780, the year he died. Between 1809 and 1815 it was away in Paris. On the map in the room, the heading is still legible, Nova et acurata totius Europae, a new and accurate map of all Europe.