The Oyster Meal

This panel was painted a year after its companion in the same room, Teasing the Pet, and the two are almost exactly the same size, both with arched tops. The museum treats them as a pair on one theme, seduction. Here the man, again with Van Mieris's own features, offers the woman oysters, a food with a reputation as an aphrodisiac, and she, again modelled on his wife, answers by baring her bosom.

Yet the two pictures spent more than two centuries in different collections. The Oyster Meal belonged by 1716 to Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, in Düsseldorf, and passed with the Bavarian royal collections to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The Bavarian state sold it in 1931, and in 1936 Henri Deterding, the oil magnate who ran Royal Dutch Shell, gave it to the Mauritshuis.