Petronella Elias with a Basket of Fruit

1657 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

portrait

The nine-year-old Petronella was the daughter of the merchant Joost Pietersz Elias, and his first wife, Rebecca Spiegel, who was a first cousin of Bol's wife, Elisabeth Dell. Basket of fruit often features in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art as allusion to fertility which explain their appearance in painting of children, as in Jacob Willemsz Delff's portrait of a two-year-old boy. The motif of fruit suggests that the child is the product of a fruitful marriage.

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About the Artist

Ferdinand Bol

1616 – 1680

Dutch painter and etcher. He was a pupil of Rembrandt in the mid-1630s and in his early work imitated his master's style so well as to create occasional difficulty in distinguishing between them. The portrait of Elizabeth Bas in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is the best-known instance; it was acknowledged as a Rembrandt until 1911, when it was attributed to Bol, and although this opinion is still generally accepted, there has been renewed support for Rembrandt as the author. As Bol's career prospered, both as a portraitist and a painter of historical subjects, his style moved away from that of Rembrandt, becoming blander and more elegant in the style of van der Helst. In 1669 he married a wealthy widow and seems to have stopped painting. Sir Godfrey Kneller was Bol's most distinguished pupil.

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