|
This panel depicts a young girl at a window ledge with a cat and a mouse-trap, a hung duck and a pewter ewer beside her.
Dou's genre paintings are often imbued with subtle emblematic meanings which would certainly not have been lost on his public. In 17th-century paintings, and in particular in Dou's own work, certain everyday objects took on other meanings and were therefore chosen by the artist for a specific reason: a set of scales, for example, could allude to the virtues of moderation and temperance; an empty bird-cage was a conventional symbol of immorality; and the open mouse-trap and lascivious expression of the cat in this painting could equally have carried some erotic overtones.
|
