Jacob Duck (The Netherlands, 1600–1667), Interior with Soldiers and Women, circa 1650, oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of J. Paul Getty, 70.PB.19.

Audio Description

This painting, titled Interior with Soldiers and Women, was painted around 1650 by the Dutch artist Jacob Duck, who lived from 1600 to 1667. It is an oil painting on panel and was given to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles by J. Paul Getty. Its accession number is 70.PB.19.

This horizontal painting, about 17 inches wide, depicts a kitchen interior with four people. We see the scene through a broad stone archway. Shelves on the back wall hold dishes and cooking utensils. Sets of stairs rise to either side, and a large cask sits in the right corner. In the center of the room, on the floor, armor, weapons, and cloaks are piled around a drum. Another group of objects are piled in the archway at the right, including a trunk, a large stringed instrument and books. At the center, two elegantly-dressed soldiers sit on ladder-back chairs, smoking pipes. One holds a wineglass; the other props his right on the stairs at left; both men look at a young woman seated on the stairs. She gazes through the arched doorway at us. Her blond hair is arranged in soft curls around her face and neck. She wears large pearl drop earrings, a red brocade bodice, dark green skirt, and a white lace-edged kerchief is draped over her shoulders. A second woman, more simply dressed, enters the room from the staircase at the right.

Label Copy

This painting, titled Interior with Soldiers and Women, was painted around 1650 by the Dutch artist Jacob Duck, who lived from 1600 to 1667. It is an oil painting on panel and was given to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles by J. Paul Getty. Its accession number is 70.PB.19.

Jacob Duck was one of many seventeenth-century Dutch artists to specialize in genre scenes—detailed depictions of everyday life that often contain deeper symbolic and moral meanings. Here, two soldiers smoke and drink while conversing with a young woman seated on the stairs. At the center of the painting, the pile of armor, weapons, and musical instruments is arranged almost as a still life.

This painting was part of an important collection of Dutch and Flemish art assembled by the French businessman Adolphe Schloss (1842–1910). The collection became a prime target for Nazi and collaborationist agencies during the war, thanks to its fame and to the fact that its owners were Jewish. In spring 1943 the collection’s hiding place was betrayed, and some 260 paintings were taken for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, Austria. This painting was one of forty-nine that remained in France and were returned to the Schloss heirs after the war.

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