A Couple Making Love in a Park Spied on by Children

1694

The Rotterdam painter Adriaen van der Werff made elegant, meticulously executed little paintings. This was the style of the Dutch fijnschilders (‘fine painters’), who worked in a highly polished manner to depict reality as precisely as possible. The skin of the woman here is painted so smoothly it looks like porcelain. She looks out at us, realizing that she and her lover are being spied on by us, as well as the two children behind the bushes.