The Egg-girl

Painted in 1573 — late in Pieter Aertsen's career — this panel of a woman selling eggs at a market represents the genre observation for which he had pioneered a visual language over the previous two decades. Aertsen had helped establish the market woman and kitchen maid as subjects worthy of monumental treatment in Netherlandish painting, investing these figures with the scale and compositional centrality previously reserved for religious subjects. By 1573 this genre had become an established market category, widely imitated by pupils and contemporaries, but Aertsen's own late works retained a quality of direct, unsentimental observation that distinguished them from workshop repetitions. The Vlaamse Kunstcollectie panel preserves the freshness of the artist's eye for domestic labour.

The late panel technique shows slight changes from Aertsen's mid-career work — the paint handling is somewhat broader and more confident, the figure rendered with a mature economy of means that achieves solidity with fewer strokes than earlier laboured passages. The eggs and market produce are painted with still-life precision while the figure has the immediacy of direct observation.