Johannes van der Aack, 'An Old Woman seated sewing', 1655

Van der Aack’s picture was painted in 1655, some seven years after the ending of the Thirty Years‘ War – one of the most destructive and brutal conflicts in European history, caused in part by a struggle for power between Catholic and Protestant countries. At the end of it, the Northern Netherlands had become the Calvinist (a strict form of Protestantism) Dutch Republic.

The old woman’s plain dress and her neat hair under a spotless white cap echoed in the long pointed collar suggest the modest costume of a woman following the Calvinist religion. She will have sewn her own garments and her large, capable hands, supported on her sewing cushion, are making another garment or household object. Her scissors sit on the table. The table is covered with a plain cloth unlike the expensive turkey carpet of a well-to-do household, as Nicolaes Maes shows in A Little Girl rocking a Cradle; this may be a choice rather than a necessity. The lemon, an expensive luxury item, is prominently displayed with the silver-handled knife the old woman has presumably used to peel it. A lemon can sometimes be a symbol of purity, or sometimes was used as a practical protection against hostile forces such as poison, magic or the plague. In any event, it is also an opportunity for van der Aack to display his skill in painting detail and texture.

We don’t know who the woman is, or if the painting was intended as a portrait or is a sympathetic – if stereotypical – representation of age and femininity. What is unusual, and seems a confirmation of the woman’s piety and strict religious views, is the picture on the wall behind her.

Van der Aack has included a copy of a portrait of Christian, Duke of Brunswick (1599–1626), a Protestant general who fought for a while for the United Provinces, which became the Dutch Republic. He was a violent Protestant partisan who saw himself as ‘friend of God and enemy of the (Catholic) priests’. The original painting was by Michiel van Miereveld and the same picture appears in Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s Interior with a Young Man seated at a Table (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). So it would appear that the Duke was an icon for the Protestant religion; perhaps the old woman – whether a real person or simply a type – is a serene, but usefully occupied, feminine icon offered as an example to others.