An old man and a girl at a vegetable and fish shop by van Mieris was acquired by George IV in 1805, and is a ‘niche’ composition as developed by Dou. The same illusionistic devices are used here - the stone arch with a ledge and a sculpted relief below with a looped curtain in the arch. Similarly, the artist destroys the illusion by placing objects in the immediate foreground. Immense effort has been lavished on rendering the textures of the different goods on display: dried herrings, gingerbread, walnuts on the ledge; mushrooms and dried fish suspended on either side of the arch; golf clubs and apples in front of the ledge; with additional fruits and gingerbread figures within the shop itself. The painting of the different types of baskets, metal containers and fabrics is a virtuoso display of pictorial skills. A touch of humour is provided by the rat (invisible to the figures in the shop) munching away at an apple at the lower edge, and human interest by the old man and the young woman who engage in their own private dialogue. Even if the brandishing of the clay pipe has erotic overtones, the old man’s gesture indicating the weights on the ledge is difficult to interpret.

The sculpted relief is reminiscent of that used by Dou in several of his compositions and recurs in other paintings by Willem van Mieris - for example The Dairy in the Staatliche Museen, Kassel, of 1705 and The Grocer’s Shop in the Mauritshuis, The Hague of 1717. Another relief of tritons and nereids was also used by the artist (see, for example, A woman and a fish-pedlar in a kitchen, 1713, in the National Gallery, London). Since Willem van Mieris is known to have made designs for reliefs, it is likely that he used his own imagination rather than copying specific examples.

It has been suggested that The Greengrocer in the Wallace Collection, London, might have been a pendant to the present picture.

Signed and dated top left corner: 'W. van Mieris Fect Ano 1732'

Catalogue entry adapted from Enchanting the Eye: Dutch paintings of the Golden Age, London, 2004