The Interior of a Smithy

In the early 1800s a seller offered this picture as a scene from English history, King Charles II at a blacksmith's after his defeat at Worcester in 1651. The story had a real root. Fleeing in disguise as a servant, Charles later told Samuel Pepys, he held his own horse's foot while a village smith shod it and asked the man for news, and the smith said he had not heard whether that rogue Charles Stuart had been taken. The National Gallery says there is no evidence at all that this is the subject. The man in the scarlet coat with gold braid is plainly no servant. He stands in the doorway leaning on a long stick, while the smith, in an open shirt, bends over a glowing horseshoe on the anvil and a boy works behind him at the forge. Metsu painted it about 1657, in his late twenties, and a smithy was an unusual subject that he returned to several times in those years. Behind the customer his horse waits in the light from the open door.