Woman cleaning fish

Woman Cleaning Fish (1658) is one of Metsu's most directly observed kitchen subjects, bringing the slightly unglamorous reality of fish preparation into the domestic interior with the same attention he gave to fashionable women at their toilettes. The Leiden Collection holds this work alongside his other kitchen canvases as part of their sustained engagement with the humbler register of Dutch genre painting. Fish cleaning as a subject appeared across the range of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, from Adriaen van Ostade's rough-hewn tavern kitchens to the more refined interiors of Metsu and later de Hooch. Metsu's version occupies a middle register — the kitchen is plain but not squalid, the woman's labor practical and dignified. By 1658, a year into his Amsterdam residence, his handling was becoming more fluent.

Canvas with attention to the textures of fish — scales, wetness, the specific sheen of cleaned fish — alongside the woman's clothing and the kitchen setting. Metsu's direct handling here is slightly more vigorous than in his fashionable genre scenes, appropriate to the subject's rougher physical reality.