Young woman winding up a watch by candlelight

This is a tiny thing, only about 15 centimeters tall, small enough to hold in one hand. In it a young woman winds a watch by the light of a single candle, that flame the only source in the whole dark room. Dutch painters loved these night pieces, where one small light does all the work and everything else sinks into shadow. A pocket watch in 1665 was still a costly novelty, so the picture is partly about the small luxury of owning your own time. What is surprising is where it ended up. Cosimo de' Medici, the future Grand Duke of Tuscany, toured the Dutch Republic at the close of the 1660s and came home with several Netschers, and that is how this little candlelit scene came to hang in Florence, in the Uffizi, where it still is.