Roma Mother with Children

This image of a woman breastfeeding an infant in the presence of two other children follows a well-established iconography for personifications of Charity (see, for example, 51.501.2273 and, especially, 53.601.16[84]). In its emphasis on the desperate circumstances of the figures—made explicit by the Latin caption—it also bears a close relationship with an allegory of Poverty engraved by Zacharias Dolendo after a design by Jacques de Gheyn II in 1596-97 (49.95.1239). Visscher, however, sheds the allegorical language of such precedents in favor of a naturalistic approach that frames the scene as one of contemporary life. Notably, the child at far left, while reminiscent of figures in 53.601.16[84] and 49.95.1239, also recalls children in the work of Rembrandt, for example the little boy in the foreground of The Pancake Woman (17.21.58), another, if very different treatment, of hunger.

This fourth state of the print was published by Clement de Jonghe, who probably acquired the copper plate after Visscher's death in 1658. De Jonghe's 1679 inventory lists the copper plate under the title "Heydinne" (the feminine form of the seventeenth-century Dutch word for gypsy or, literally, heathen). This perjorative term refers to the itinerant Roma, or Romani, people, who appear in a number of Dutch landscapes and genre scenes from the period. The present work is, however, unusual in its focused and sympathetic portrayal of such individuals.

Visscher made finished drawings closely related to this composition. A preparatory drawing was also acquired by the Museum in 2016 (2016.528). Various copies of and variants after the print and some of these drawings were produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

(JSS, 7/5/18; updated 4/19/2022)