Two Old Women and a Servant

portrait

The three figures in this painting are people who really existed, as proved by the records in the Medici archives. In this work, Suttermans, a famed portrait artist, who had successfully immortalised and celebrated the most important figures in the Medici family, documents with great sagacity the small domestic world that surrounded and accompanied court life. In this case, the two old women with wrinkled faces and a lively, wry expressions are Domenica delle Cascine, a duck and chicken seller, and a peasant woman, Francesca, or "Cecca" from Pratolino.

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About the Artist

Justus Sustermans

1597 – 1681

Flemish painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. During his lifetime Giusto Suttermans (as he signed his name), court painter to the Medici, was considered the foremost portrait painter in Italy, the peer of van Dyck, Rubens or Holbein. His best works show that he deserved his contemporaries' esteem, but time, the extinction of the Medici family and the failure of art historians to recognize the difference between his autograph works and those by his workshop, copyists and contemporary Florentine painters have all contributed to tarnish his once high reputation.

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