the onion Seller

Dated 1650 and once in the Musées Nationaux Récupération — works recovered from wartime looting awaiting restitution — this early genre scene of an onion seller belongs to Van Mieris's apprentice or very early independent period; at twenty-five in 1650, he was still refining the fijnschilder technique under Dou's influence. Market vendor subjects derived from a Flemish tradition stretching back to Beuckelaer and Aertsen, mediated through Flemish emigrants to Leiden, and the onion seller was among the most socially specific types in that tradition: a working-class figure occupying a position outside the comfortable domestic world of Van Mieris's later work. The Musées Nationaux Récupération category indicates the work was looted during the Nazi occupation of France and has not yet been definitively restituted to its pre-war owners or their heirs. The early date makes this a document of Van Mieris's technical development as much as a finished masterwork.

Oil on panel with an early palette that may show more of Dou's brownish warmth than Van Mieris's own subsequent preferences. The onions themselves — their papery amber skins, their root fibres, their varied shapes — provide a still-life challenge within the figure composition. The vendor's aged face and worn working clothes are treated with the sympathetic observation that distinguishes even early Van Mieris from the more schematic characterisation of his contemporaries.