Spanish, A Man and a Child eating Grapes

A man and child are seated at a table. The man looks attentively at the child, who turns away and picks a grape from a bunch nearby. The rest of the composition is only roughly sketched in; the child’s left arm, the man’s body and the table are unfinished.

The painting was once thought to be by a seventeenth-century Spanish artist, and was formerly attributed to Diego Velázquez and to Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio (1635–1695), known for his popular childhood scenes. However, it is more likely that it is a copy of a seventeenth-century Spanish painting by an artist working in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It cannot have been made later than this as the painting was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century at the Earl of Clare sale in London. During this period, artists copied works by Spanish old masters as part of their academic training.