The Gallant Conversation, known as Paternal Admonition

For a long time people looked at this quiet interior and saw a father scolding his daughter, which is how it got the name The Paternal Admonition. The trouble is the man is far too young to be anyone's father, and when the smaller version of the scene in Berlin was cleaned, a coin turned up between his raised fingers. That changes the room completely. What ter Borch painted around 1654 is almost certainly a proposition, a man paying for the company of the woman in the shimmering satin gown whose back is turned to us. Ter Borch loved that ambiguity and left the exact words of the exchange to us. The one thing everyone agrees on is that dress, its folds of pale silk catching the light so precisely that other painters studied it for generations.