Nicolaes Maes, 'A Woman scraping Parsnips, with a Child standing by her', 1655

At first glance, this dark room might seem bare and forbidding but the deep brown of the walls encloses the two figures in warmth and serenity. There’s just enough light to reveal them but Maes doesn‘t show the window, so the comfortable atmosphere isn’t disturbed. The concentration of woman and child, their gaze directed intently downwards, takes our own eyes to the woman’s hands. She holds the parsnip delicately, scraping it away from her, so that the peel lands in the dish in her lap. And we, like the little girl, learn how it should be done.

At the time the painting was made, Calvinist preachers – often vociferously – recommended that ‘the devil should be beaten out of a child’, but genre pictures of this kind showed a gentler attitude towards the education and discipline of children. The painting wasn‘t necessarily hung on a wall as a lesson in child-rearing, but it would have been seen at least as a picture of domestic calm to be held as a desired end.

Since it arrived at the National Gallery in 1838, the picture has had three different titles, first ’Mother Scraping Parsnips with a Child‘, second ’The Cookmaid‘ and now ’A Woman scraping Parsnips with a Child standing by her‘. We don’t know why the changes were made or exactly when, but it does make the relationship between woman and child open to question. Are we looking at the mother of the household with her child, a servant with her mistress’s child, or a servant with her own child? The woman’s clothes aren‘t luxurious – simple, modest and made of fairly rough, hard-wearing fabrics – but her hair is immaculate, pulled back under a cap displaying pearl-like beads. No silks or satins for the child either, but she has a bib and an apron to keep her unpretentious clothes clean. Her hair isn’t long enough to pin back, but its tendrils are held tidily by her cap.

The ceramic jug standing alone on the window sill was an expensive item. Maes makes a feature of it by lighting it up till it almost glows. Was it precious to the household? Or did he simply include it because the composition needed filling out? There’s a certain sadness in its isolation, just as the meagreness of only three parsnips seem to suggest a poor meal for woman and child. It’s possible that Maes is showing a virtuous, hard-working woman, bringing up her child to be a good housewife and mother in straitened circumstances, although perhaps the most likely interpretation remains that we are looking at the maid of the household.