The Gold Weigher

In 1720, when all of Paris was speculating in the shares of the Scottish financier John Law's Mississippi Company, Victor-Amédée of Savoy, prince of Carignan, turned the garden of his Paris mansion, the Hôtel de Soissons, into a trading ground for share dealers. The bubble burst that same year. The prince went on living far beyond his means and died in 1741 deep in debt, and Louis XV bought paintings from his heirs. This little panel was among them.

An old man with spectacles on his nose holds up a tiny pair of scales while he fingers coins at his table, beside money bags and a document with a red wax seal. Dou signed and dated it 1664. Pictures like this were classic allusions to avarice, and the royal inventory of 1754 simply called it a man with spectacles.

In 1775 it was stolen from the royal collection, together with two paintings by Willem van Mieris, a Leiden painter of the next generation. By 1785 it was back, perhaps bought back, though an inventory of that year listed it under the name of Willem's father, Frans van Mieris.