Within the realm of family portrait painting, children where a subject in their own right for many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters. The exhibition highlights individual portraits of children ranging from a charming children’s portrait by Nicolaes Maes’ to the portrait of a young Hugo Grotius at the age of sixteen.
Rembrandt has also often drawn and engraved children. He usually shows them interacting with women (mothers, grandmothers, nurses) or in the guise of young apprentices in his workshop.
In addition to these well-known works, the exhibition also offers many works never from the collection that have never been on display and some new acquisitions.
Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), Portrait of a Little Girl with a Deer , ca 1680
Fondation Custodia / Frits Lugt Collection, Paris