VERHOUT, Constantijn - b. ~1630 Gouda, d. ~1667 Gouda - WGA

VERHOUT, Constantijn

(b. ~1630 Gouda, d. ~1667 Gouda)

Dutch painter. There are only four paintings (two of them signed) and a handful of drawing known by him. The paintings are the Sleeping Student (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), Portrait of Cornelis Abrahamsz. Graswinckel, The Lesson, and Still-Life with a Crab (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

His pupil was the painter Johannes Voorhout.

Sleeping Student
Sleeping Student by

Sleeping Student

This panel is a genre piece and shows a young student asleep at his desk, one hand tucked into his jacket. In front of him are his gloves, a notebook, a pen and inkhorn, and six books, five of them piled up in a towerlike arrangement, which becomes the focus of the composition. Probably the painting conveys a moral message. It can be seen as a vanitas picture. Alternatively, it could be viewed as a representation of one of the seven deadly sins: sloth.

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