# An Old Woman by a Fireplace [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [VREL, Jacobus]() - Date: 1651-1700 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 36 x 31 cm ## Commentary An Old Woman by a Fireplace 1550s Oil on canvas, 36 x 31 cm The Hermitage, St. Petersburg Political transformations in 17th-century Holland produced new art customers - ordinary townspeople whose tastes prompted artists to look closely at simple subjects - and a demand for small paintings to adorn middle-class houses. Among those artists who accommodated the new artistic audience was Jacobus Vrel, either a naive imitator of the Delft school or, as is suggested by some dated works, the inventor of the quiet domestic scene that the mid-17th-century genre school then took to perfection. ## Related artworks - [Sleeping Woman \(The Convalescent\)]() - [The Hospital Orderly]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()