An interior with a woman peeling apples

Abraham van Strij I, who trained in Antwerp before settling in Dordrecht, was perhaps the most accomplished Dutch genre painter around the turn of the 19th century. As Eric Jan Sluijter and Peter Sutton have noted, the present work recalls the spatial formulas and household motifs typical of the 17th-century art of Pieter de Hooch, including the tiled floor, ornate framed mirror, gentle light streaming through the window at left, "dog at the threshold harkening to our presence and the woman in the distance viewed from the back" (loc. cit.). Indeed Van Strij was renowned in his day as "the modern Pieter de Hoog". Along with the work of early Dutch art historians, Van Strij's homage to the art of nearly 150 years earlier played a crucial role in cultivating Holland's pride in its heritage, which "celebrat[ed] domesticity and [viewed] the home as a secular temple" (ibid.).