The Pancake Maker

The Pancake Maker of 1663, held at the Bavarian State Painting Collections, belongs to a tradition of popular food-vendor and food-preparation images that Leiden and Haarlem painters cultivated as a deliberately democratic counterpart to elevated history painting. Pancake sellers and their customers appear across Dutch and Flemish genre painting, the hot, simple food and its open-fire preparation offering artists occasions for animated social observation. Dou's version focuses on the maker herself, framed in his characteristic window or stall aperture, the griddle and batter equipment producing a still-life display of kitchen tools within the genre scene. By 1663 Dou was in his late fifties and the technical quality of his work had not diminished; the Pancake Maker's small panel surface shows the same accumulated glazing refinement as works from his peak decade. The choice of subject may reflect a deliberate appeal to the Dutch tradition of depicting ordinary people with dignity, a tradition begun by Pieter Aertsen and continued through Dou's own teacher Rembrandt into the later seventeenth century.

Small panel with mature glazing; the pancake griddle's hot metal surface reflects orange firelight rather than cooler ambient light, demanding a shift in the warm-toned palette from Dou's usual window-lit domestic scenes. Batter in the ladle and the partially cooked pancake on the griddle are rendered with the appetite-stimulating vividness that Dutch culinary genre painting made its speciality. The woman's face is lit from below by fire rather than from above by window, producing the same inverted shadow pattern as Dou's candlelit scenes.