'The Caudle Makers'

An old woman sits stirring a silver brandy bowl while an old man beside her grates spice over it, probably nutmeg. The title we use, The Caudle Makers, was only given to the panel in 1881. Caudle was a warm drink of brandy, egg yolks and cinnamon, served to a new mother and her visitors after a birth. The Mauritshuis has its doubts about that reading. There are no eggs and no cinnamon here, and no sign of any baby. The old man also wears the same outdated hat and clothes as the quack doctors in Steen's scenes of a physician's visit, a costume his buyers would have recognised as a figure of fun. What the pair are really brewing is left open. Steen painted the panel in the second half of the 1660s. It never belonged to Prince William V. It spent the 19th century in Dutch private collections, came to the Mauritshuis on loan in 1954 and was given to the museum in 1957. Since 2010 it has hung in the Gallery Prince Willem V.