An Old Woman by a Fireplace

Political transformations in 17th-century Holland produced new art customers - ordinary townspeople whose tastes prompted artists to look closely at simple subjects - and a demand for small paintings to adorn middle-class houses. Among those artists who accommodated the new artistic audience was Jacobus Vrel, either a naive imitator of the Delft school or, as is suggested by some dated works, the inventor of the quiet domestic scene that the mid-17th-century genre school then took to perfection.