Girl Eating Oysters

Like oysters, salt was considered an aphrodisiac. The glass of wine and the presence of the bed may indicate the girl’s intentions, as do her direct gaze and sly smile: she is offering herself. Steen fluently adapts his brushwork to suit the scale of his paintings, varying between the painstaking strokes of a miniaturist for this diminutive panel and a more painterly technique for the grand canvas “As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young," also on view in the exhibition.