(Helsingør 1624–1687 Rome)
Sleeping girl with two children playing; Boys quarrelling (Allegory of touch),
oil on canvas, 72.5 x 143 cm and 73 x 141 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
Sale Christie’s, London, 14 July 1978, lot 126 (as Antonio Amorosi);
Galleria Megna, Rome;
European Private Collection

Literature:
M. Heimbürger, Bernardo Keilhau detto Monsù Bernardo, Rome 1988, p. 208, nos. 108 and 109

The present pair of paintings has been dated to the end of the 1650s by Minna Heimburger (see literature). Genre scenes with playing children are a recurrent theme in the artist’s production, but rarely do they have the luminous and intense chromatic harmony that distinguishes this pair.

The Sleeping girl with two children playing shows a subject much favoured by the artist and comparable with works such as the Sleeping girl at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich and the Sleeping girl with fan at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, in which there are also the same chromatic tones of yellow and red, and the same featuring of the basket.

The picture belongs to an iconographic tradition, in which a sleeping figure is awakened by another by tickling him or her under the nose with a piece of straw or, as in this case, a feather. This iconography was supposedly introduced into Dutch painting by Jacob Duck (circa 1600–1667).