The Artist in His Studio

A painter in a fur cap and a green and gold gown leans on a stone ledge with his palette in hand and glances to one side. Behind him in the gloom a younger man bends over his work, and a canvas stands on an easel. On the ledge stands a white statuette of a nude woman, and a patterned red shawl hangs over the sill. Beneath it runs a carved relief of plump children at play. That arrangement, a painted stone window with a relief below, is the formula Gerrit Dou made famous in Leiden in the 1600s. Braun took it over more than a century later in Vienna, down to the small birdcage hanging in the recess. He painted the picture on copper, signed it simply A. Braun, and left it undated.