Seated Woman Searching for Fleas (c. 1671): Art, History and Details

Seated Woman Searching for Fleas (c. 1671) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636–1672).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Born into a prominent family of Dutch marine painters, Adriaen van de Velde was admired as a landscape painter. He specialized in atmospheric pastoral scenes that feature livestock and rustic figures drawn from life. This intimate study of a shepherdess searching for fleas exemplifies the artist’s skilled use of red chalk to capture the effects of light and shade.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Woman Searching for Fleas
• Date: c. 1671
• Creator attribution: Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636–1672)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk over black chalk; framing lines in pen and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 18.4 x 23.4 cm (7 1/4 x 9 3/16 in.); Secondary Support: 18.4 x 23.4 cm (7 1/4 x 9 3/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1966.239

A detail from the museum

Considered mere nuisances for those living in close proximity to animals, fleas would only become known as carriers of such illnesses as the bubonic plague almost 200 years after this drawing was made.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Stechow, Wolfgang. “A Painting and a Drawing by Adriaen van de Velde.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 2 (February 1967): 30–35.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.