Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection

 

It is the seventeenth century in the Netherlands. Imagine you are a nine-year-old boy and your parents decide you are to become an artist. As an apprentice, you are given into a master`s care, who has to belong to a guild. With him, your parents sign a contract to teach you the craft. You will not be coming home every day after school, but instead, you will live and study in the master`s house for years to come. At first, you would not even be allowed to use paint and brushes, but would have to start at the very bottom, with cleaning the workplace and tools. Eventually, you would get to learn more of your trade. You would start by copying your master`s work, then draw from plaster casts, and finally from live models, before you are even allowed to use precious paint. In this painting, Steen shows a boy being taught the most basic skill: drawing.

Imagine instead, you are a nine-year-old girl and you want to become an artist. Too bad for you! It is not appropriate for you to stay in a master`s house. So, if you don`t have a father, uncle, or otherwise close friend of the family who is an artist, there is not a big chance for you to get an education as one. This makes it so intriguing that Steen depicts a boy and a girl in the identically named painting at the Getty Museum.

http://smalltreasures.as.ua.edu/annotated-bibliograph/

by Brigitte Kalmbach