The Bookkeeper

An elderly man in a fur-trimmed red cap and a silk house robe holds up his quill, a penknife in the other hand, checking the point he has just cut. Anyone who wrote all day in the 18th century had to recut goose quills constantly, and Dutch painters had made that small chore into a subject long before. Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt's first pupil, painted a scholar sharpening his quill in Leiden in the early 1630s.

This canvas is small, about 26 by 21 centimetres, and the museum dates it only roughly, to around 1720 to 1730. Nobody knows who the man was, and the title simply names his trade. An hourglass stands on the table beside his papers, the old reminder that time is running out, here placed next to a man who keeps accounts. The Mauritshuis owns the picture and has shown it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague since 2010.