The Holy Family in an Interior
1643
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Ferdinand Bol
Ferdinand Bol (24 June 1616 - 24 August 1680) was a Dutch painter, etcher and draftsman.
See the richer artist page1643
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Holy Family in an Interior is a 1643 by Ferdinand Bol, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet room: Mary sits in a wooden chair, nursing baby Jesus while Joseph stands beside her holding a cloth. A single window throws light across the scene, brightening a book on a small desk. The rest of the room fades into shadow. Bol painted this just after leaving Rembrandt’s workshop. He borrowed Rembrandt’s trick of using deep shadows and a single light source to make a biblical moment feel like it’s happening in a real Dutch home. Look up *chiaroscuro* to see how artists use light and dark to shape a scene.
Ferdinand Bol made this etching just one year after he left the studio of his famous teacher, Rembrandt van Rijn, adopting his master’s motif of a dark domestic interior as the setting for a biblical scene. Here, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus sit within a contemporary Dutch interior with the light from a window the sole source of illumination, revealing an open book at a small desk. The rest of the room is in deep shadow. As Mary nurses the child, Joseph stands by with a swaddling cloth. To their left is a curtained cupboard bed of the type commonly found within Dutch living rooms, a bassinet, a…
The tall basket laid on its end visible in this composition is a bakermat , a legless couch typical in 17th-century Netherlands that was placed on the floor for nursing.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Ferdinand Bol (24 June 1616 - 24 August 1680) was a Dutch painter, etcher and draftsman.
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