The Spinner's Prayer

In the spring of 1858 the English novelist George Eliot spent several months in Munich, in the middle of writing her first novel, Adam Bede. She visited the Alte Pinakothek, and in a letter she described the pleasure of calling up in your mind a little Gerard Dou you had seen hanging in the corner of one of its cabinets. The novel came out early in 1859. Its chapter 17 defends paintings of ordinary life and lingers on an old woman eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light falls on her cap and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel and her stone jug. Hugh Witemeyer, who studied Eliot and the visual arts, traced that passage to this panel, which Dou painted around 1645 on a piece of oak not quite 30 centimetres square.