Harringay House painting: Adriaen Jansz, Mother Holding Her Child In A Doorway

This intimate picture of 1667 was painted relatively late in Ostade's career.
Around this time he painted quite a number of works showing domestic courtyards and dooryards with small numbers of people engaged in domestic pursuits or resting from their labours - including, in a faint echo of his former taste for the raucous, outside inns. These works are however universally tranquil in mood, and in this picture, one of a few in which he reduces his subject matter to a single figure or a mother and child, he further refines and concentrates his subject matter. The mother he depicts is not engaged in any form of activity; she merely holds her child up as if showing to it the outside world, protecting it with her arm, and with a demure downcast face that echoes the modest demeanour of the Virgin Mary in the religious paintings by Haarlem contemporaries such as Jan de Bray.