1880 copy of 'Man with a Pipe'

This 1880 copy of Dou's Man with a Pipe, held at the Amsterdam Museum, documents the nineteenth-century practice of copying Old Masters both as artistic training and as independent collectible objects. By 1880 Gerrit Dou occupied a particularly high position in the canonical esteem of Dutch Golden Age painting, and his technical virtuosity made his works favourite subjects for copying exercises. The Amsterdam Museum holds the copy as a historical artefact documenting later reception of Dou's work — a meta-object that tells the story of how seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting was valued and transmitted in the Victorian era. The fact that the copy was significant enough to enter a museum collection suggests it was either a particularly accomplished example or had documentation linking it to a notable copyist.

Oil on canvas (rather than Dou's typical panel), painted in 1880 with what would have been considered period-appropriate technique. The copyist would have attempted to replicate Dou's smooth fijnschilder surface on a different support — an inherently imperfect enterprise, since panel's stability and smoothness cannot be exactly reproduced on canvas.