The Cart (Return from Haymaking)

The Cart is signed Lenain and dated 1641, with the family name only, as the three brothers signed everything. Early in the 20th century the scholars Robert Witt and Paul Jamot gave it to Louis, and the Louvre says that attribution has never really been doubted.

What people have argued over is who these people are. For a long time they were taken for poor peasants and day labourers. In 1979 the art historian Neil MacGregor, later director of the National Gallery in London, looked hard at the children's clothes. They are made of good cloth, cut to fit and barely patched, with clean white caps and collars, and he worked out what such outfits and shoes would have cost. His answer was a family of small landowners, comfortably off. In 1994 Jean-Pierre Cuzin wondered whether the seated woman with her grave little children might belong to the charitable sisterhoods Vincent de Paul was organising in exactly those years.

The colour has puzzled people just as much. In 1899 the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans called the canvas strangely whitish, like the pale light before a storm, lifted only by a woman's red sleeves and a lemon-yellow cauldron.