Trompe l'Oeil with a Bust of Venus

This canvas is meant to fool you. Everdingen painted a marble bust of Venus as if it stood on a ledge above a doorway, and to make the stone look real he set a few soft things against it, a pink shawl and wreaths of periwinkle. He signed it in the lower left with his initials joined in a monogram and dated it 1665.

Everdingen was a history painter who worked mostly with figures from myth and allegory, and as far as anyone knows this picture and its partner are the only still lifes he ever made. The partner shows a bust of Adonis, the mortal youth Venus loved, and it is now in Cape Town, in the Michaelis Collection at the Old Town House. The museum thinks the two probably hung together in the painter's own house in Alkmaar, where a fake bust above a real door would have made sense.

The Venus was given to the Mauritshuis in 1992 by Mrs Staring-de Mol van Otterloo of Vorden, whose husband had owned it since 1939.