(Venice or Vicenza 1602/3–1678 Venice)
A female teacher with two pupils,
oil on canvas, 64.5 x 84.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph and for his help in cataloguing the present painting.

The picture is a typical, and yet in some respects, unusual work of the Venetian Seicento painter, Pietro della Vecchia. The artist is one of the most interesting figures in the painterly culture of seventeenth century Northern Italy, due to his stylistic versatility and his, at times, highly original, even provocative subject matter. The canvas references the subject matter of two other successful compositions used by Vecchia, combining them in an innovative manner. The first composition depicts one, or two (male) teachers explaining a text to two or more pupils, an example of this is in Thiene, in a private collection (see B. Aikema, Pietro della Vecchia and the Heritage of the Renaissance in Venice, Florence 1990, cat. 157, fig. 116). The second composition also depicts a teacher, who holds a mirror in front of an elegantly dressed young man, another youngster looking out of the picture towards us (see B. Aikema, Ibid., 1990, cat. 132, fig. 113).

In the present painting, the teacher is female, which is exceptional, if not unique for Vecchia as well as for the period, and the scene is in mirror-image to the above-mentioned compositional examples. Interestingly, the writing on the large sheet is (partly) legible, as is often the case in Vecchia’s work. Its meaning, however, is difficult to interpret.

Pietro della Vecchia’s pictures are usually not easy to date. Taking the above-mentioned compositions into account, Aikema has proposed dating the present work to shortly after 1650.