Arnold Boonen (Dordrecht, 1669-1729)
The Drawing Lesson: A Young Boy being taught to draw a Bas Relief by Candle Light

oil on panel

Dimensions: 33.5 x 42.5 cm. (13 x 16 3/4 in.)

Private Collection, France.

Boonen was born in Dordrech, the son of a merchant, and began his artistic training at the age of thirteen with Arnold Verbuys, He went on to become apprentice to Godfried Shalcken, who he worked under for six years from 1683.

Boonen’s small-scale genre paintings, largely produced before 1700, draw directly on the tradition of the Leiden fijnschilders that Schalcken had learned from Gerrit Dou in the 1660s. The candlelit setting of this work reflects Boonen’s debt to both artists, pioneers of the nocturne as an independent subject.

By the light of a long tapering candle, two boys study a plaster cast of Vulcan’s Forge by the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries, today in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich. The original bronze, completed in 1611 during de Vries’s service as court sculptor to Rudolf II in Prague, depicts Vulcan and his assistants forging armour and weapons for Aeneas, as recounted in the Aeneid.