Usurer with a Tearful Woman

A woman in tears holds up a sheet of paper, a legal document, to an old moneylender who sits among his coins and his strongbox and does not move. The museum suggests the scene could be read as a warning to both of them, the borrower who went too far and the lender who profits from it, in a society that prized thrift. Metsu painted it in 1654, while he was still working in his native Leiden, and signed it on a slip of paper at the left.

Its recorded history begins in 1687, at an anonymous sale in Amsterdam, 20 years after the painter's death. Later its price climbed with the Paris taste for Dutch scenes of everyday life. At the Hôtel Drouot in 1867 it fetched 8,400 francs, and when it came back to the same auction house in 1874 it sold for 40,000.