Pescatrice sorridente

In the 1630s the herring catch off the Dutch coast was one of the things holding the young Republic together, and painters in Haarlem turned the children who hauled and hawked that fish into a small craze of their own. This girl sits in the dunes with a wooden tub of herrings on her lap, one fish still in her hand, grinning past us at something to the side. The quick, unfussed brushwork is why the picture has long been given to Frans Hals, though it now sits in a private collection and, like several of these fisher children, its authorship has been argued over. It was first recorded in 1910 under the plain title of a woman selling herrings.