A Man spinning Yarn with a Peasant Woman and a Baby in a Wicker Cot

PROVENANCE:
Cholmeley E. Dering, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square; Christie's, London, 7 June 1858, lot 36 (£3 to Behrens);
Spanish Private Collection

NOTE:
This work most probably dates from shortly after Toorenvliet's return to Leiden. This stage of his career is more difficult to chart, owing to the paucity of dated works, but his oeuvre from these mature years is characterised by the more anecdotal nature of his subjects and his tendency to depict figures in full-length (E.J. Sluijter, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Leidse Fijnschilders, Zwolle and Leiden, 1988, p. 245).

This painting reveals a particular debt to Cornelis Bega, from Haarlem, whose work Toorenvliet presumably must have admired, although there is no record of them ever having met. The subject, in which a man is shown spinning yarn and tending his child in a humble interior while being chided by his wife, seems to be a deliberate play on the classic role-reversal story of Hercules and Omphale, which in baroque Italy was used to illustrate the idea of woman's domination over man.