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Abraham van den Tempel (1622/23-1672)
The maid of Leiden receiving the maid of the cloth trade. Signed and dated AB van d Tempel f A 1651. Canvas, 207 × 266.5 cm.

Leiden, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, inv.nr.427. Painted as one of a series of three allegories for the Governors' Room of the Lakenhal when it was still the headquarters of the Leiden woolen industry.

For the artist's connection with his subject, see the text. Van den Tempel's allegories are a case study in the relativity of taste. In 1750, they were admired vastly by Jan van Gool, the author of a book of lives of the Dutch artists, but by 1794 they were said to be inferior to the artist's portraits, and in the twentieth century they were singled out for dispraise by Abraham Bredius and Willem Martin. In 1981 the present painting was included in the major exhibition Gods, saints and heroes, a turning point in the revaluation of historical and allegorical painting in the seventeenth century in Holland.

Wijnman 1959, p. 64. A. Blankert, in exhib. cat. God en de goden, nr. 53.