Peasant Family at a Well

A peasant mother and her children gather at a stone well, the small boy in his round white cap watching as water is drawn, the family’s quiet dignity rendered with the grave, silvery light of seventeenth-century French realism. The artist is known as the Master of the Children’s Caps for the distinctive headgear worn by the children in his peasant scenes; this picture was long exhibited as a work of the Le Nain brothers — the great mid-century painters of French peasant life — and still carries that association in its early bibliography, though modern scholarship groups it under the anonymous master’s name. It was in the Paris collection of the journalist Henri Rochefort by 1905, was sold from the Sedelmeyer collection in 1907 as by the Le Nain brothers, passed through Ehrich Galleries in New York and the collection of the Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén, and entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1923. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.