JACOB GERRITSZ. CUYP (DORDRECHT 1594-1652)

Images of men holding fowl and women with baskets of eggs frequently appear in the work of the Utrecht painter Abraham Bloemaert, with whom Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp probably studied in the second half of the 1610s, and his sons Hendrick and Cornelis (see, for example, Abraham's An old man with a chicken in The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg and Hendrick's Old woman selling eggs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Such works often carried sexual connotations, with the Dutch verb vogelen (literally, 'to bird') meaning both to hunt birds and to copulate. Furthermore, the paintings bear a close relationship with the popular subject of the hennetaster, which likewise carried overtly erotic associations.
Several similar pairs of paintings by Cuyp, also with the sheet of paper inscribed with the proverb 'money does everything', are known, including examples today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn.