Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans, 'The Blind Beggar', 1853

An old man leans against the ancient stone wall of a church, tilting his head towards the light that shines down on the scene. A little girl leans towards him, her gaze turned back perhaps towards someone approaching. Her hand is outstretched as if she is begging.

Dyckmans has painted the figures in earthy colours made mellow by the soft golden light that touches both of their faces and the child’s hand. The pair are shabby but spotlessly clean. Their skin glows in the light; their hair and the man’s beard, painted strand by strand with a brush with a single hair, is combed and meticulous. Dyckmans presents a sanitised vision of poverty, ensuring that there is nothing in his picture that his customers might find too upsetting. The man, his eyes closed, looks as though he could be dozing in the late evening sun; only the picture’s title and the slight lifting of the man’s head suggest his blindness.

Behind them, an old woman leaves the church holding a prayer book. A lamp burns behind her. The old man holds a rosary, confirming his piety. This painting, perhaps a little sentimental to modern eyes, was intended for the nineteenth-century middle-class home, where charity towards the poor was encouraged – though donations were restricted to people thought of as ‘the deserving poor’, such as the neat and tidy old man and child. Those considered rogues – shown drunk, thieving or simply dirty, in pamphlets and other publications put out by organisations concerned with the morals of the poor – need not apply for charity, as it would be withheld (doubtless with a strong sense of self-justification).

Dyckman’s skill in the painting of textures – not just the physical attributes of the characters but the subtle difference in the fabrics of their garments – earned him the nickname of the Belgian Gerrit Dou, an artist whose style he admired. Dou was a leading member of a group of seventeenth-century Dutch artists known as ‘fijnschilders’ (‘fine painters’), famous for their genre scenes painted in refined and realistic detail with almost invisible brushstrokes. Dou’s A Poulterer’s Shop is also in the National Gallery’s collection.

The National Gallery painting is a reduced version of a picture of the same name painted by Dyckmans the year before (now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp). In the Antwerp picture, three candles glow in the darkened church in place of the old woman, and the little girl is shown seated with her chin on her hand. The old man is also seated, but the position of his head and the expression on his face are the same as in this picture. When shown at the National Gallery in the nineteenth century, this second, smaller version was a huge success, with many copies produced and prints made for a wide and appreciative audience.