Women Working on Pillow Lace (The Sewing School)

The painting depicts a group of young women in full length, modestly dressed and seated on simple wicker chairs, who are making pillow lace in a bare room without windows or furnishings. The “sewing school,” a widespread theme in genre painting of the period, was most likely developed as such by the Danish artist Bernhard Keil (1624-1687), known as Monsù Bernardo, who was active in northern Italy and who repeatedly treated the subject as an allegory of the senses of touch and sight.