The Le Nain Brothers, 'Four Figures at a Table', about 1643

In this sombre scene a peasant woman, a young girl and two children sit round a table in a dreary room with bare walls. The older girl and woman look straight at us, their furrowed brows, pursed lips and tense gazes creating a feeling of melancholy or despair. The boy concentrates on cutting bread, smiling contently, his hat tipped playfully to one side. In the background a young girl emerges through the gloom – her appearance ghostlike, her hands clasped together, her stare direct and unsettling.

An intense light coming from the left falls most strongly on the woman and the crisp linen tablecloth. It picks out the plain ceramic jug and the dish, which seem precariously balanced on the edge of the table, the woman’s hand stopping the cloth beneath them from slipping. The family are impoverished but remain dignified: their clothes are simple, but not shabby and torn.

The meaning of the painting is somewhat mysterious. It has been suggested that it represents the three ages of man, because of the different ages of the old woman, younger girl and the two children. But there does not seem to be enough difference between the attitude of the figures to support this interpretation, and we may only be looking at two generations rather than three. The picture has also been called ‘Saying Grace’, though it is unclear whether the little girl is indeed praying.

The three Le Nain brothers – Antoine, Louis and Mathieu – painted many scenes of everyday life experienced by the peasant classes. Such images reflected the intense debates about the proper treatment of the poor across Europe during the seventeenth century, and this was a particular preoccupation of the pious Catholic movement in Paris where the brothers lived and worked. The numerous copies of pictures like this one suggests that there was a substantial market for them, at a time when similar Dutch and Flemish genre scenes were very popular. These small, intimate pictures appealed to middle-class collectors, perhaps the urban landowners who were encouraged in contemporary manuals to treat their farm workers with the greatest respect.

When the painting was cleaned and restored in 1978, X-ray images revealed that it is painted over a portrait of a bearded man turned clockwise through 90 degrees; the pentimenti (alterations made by the artist that have become visible) above the head of the woman in this picture are actually the ruffled sleeve of the man beneath. The large collar of the boy in the painting was typically worn during the 1640s; this helps us to date the work to around 1643, when the brothers were established artists working in Paris.

The National Gallery owns three other works by the Le Nain brothers: A Woman and Five Children, The Adoration of the Shepherds and Three Men and a Boy.