The Licentious Kitchen Maid

A man tops up a kitchen maid's glass, and she lets him. Behind her a monkey, for 17th-century viewers the very image of animal lust, peers up under her skirts, while an old man in the doorway raises a finger in warning. A viewer in the 1660s would have read the scene at once. Kitchen maids and their admirers were a familiar subject in Dutch genre painting of the time, nearly always with a double meaning. Pieter van Roestraten painted this canvas around 1665, about the time he left the Dutch Republic for London, where he would work for the rest of his life almost entirely as a painter of still lifes. The picture has also been known by a gentler title, The Declaration of Love.