Courtyard with a Farrier shoeing a Horse

Courtyard with a Farrier shoeing a HorseWouwermans was the son of one artist (Pauwels), and brother to two more (Pieter and Johannes, both of whom seem to have been subsumed into their more talented brother's studio). The return of Pieter van Laer, (Il Bamboccio) from Italy to Haarlem in 1638 seems to have caught the young Wouwermans at a seminal moment (he joined the Haarlem Guild in 1640). The story, told by Houbraken, that Wouwermans acquired sketches and notebooks of Van Laer's after

also a painter of sea-pieces

A sketch for the ceiling of the salone of the Villa Cordellina at Montecchio Maggiore

The painting seems to be an autograph 'modello' for Rubens's altarpiece of the Miracles of Saint Ignatius

Doubts have recently been expressed by Tümpel

reds and whites concentrated in this area create a passage of colour

but only a B (or cB in monogram) is now visible

Gudlaugsson's attribution to De Moor (on photograph mount

The sitter's left arm

Another half-length copy is at Versailles

which cannot be Verboom's

Young David holds the impaled head of the Philistine giant and marches in front of a general riding a white horse

at this time there was an outbreak of plague