Caspar Netscher, A Lady teaching a Child to Read

Caspar Netscher shows two delightful children, both busy. The woman’s pencil guides the little girl as she stumbles through her reading, and the light from the window spills down on her. She’s immaculately dressed, a spotless white fichu round her neck, and her ringlets are held in place with blue ribbons that are echoed round her puff sleeve – the perfect child.

We don‘t know if it’s the child’s mother or a maid helping with the reading lesson, but the woman’s posture isn’t quite as genteel as might be expected in a household with elegantly dressed offspring and a costly Turkish carpet on the table. Perhaps that’s all part of the joke. Whoever she is, the woman looks out at us, her hand on her knee as if she has just flopped it there with a sigh. The little girl is more intent on the task than she is.

Behind them a little boy, also flatteringly lit, kneels on the floor. At that time and until the early 1900s, boys wore skirts until they were five or six years old, when the wearing of breeches was celebrated as a rite of passage. Unlike his sister, the boy plays with a tiny dog. On the floor beside him are his discarded toys and a cheap broadsheet with coloured pictures – no sign of his sister’s serious reading matter. A discarded knucklebone, used in a game, lies beside it and, perhaps most important, a top. Overhead on the wall is a copy of Rubens’s enormous painting, The Brazen Serpent. It told an Old Testament story of sin and retribution, but it is well hidden in the shadows and therefore unlikely to have any bearing on the scene below.

There may be a moral in the painting, though it was more likely to have been bought for amusement. In a popular emblem book of the time is a picture of a top with a hand over it, wielding a whip. The motto in the book reads: ‘The further the rod from the backside, the lazier they grow in the service of God.’ It doesn‘t appear that any whips have been wielded anywhere near the little boy’s backside and his happy expression suggests they’re unlikely to be so. The picture shows above all a charming scene, beautifully painted by Netscher’s expert hand.