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Gerrit van Honthorst - The Flea Hunt

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Gerrit van Honthorst - The Flea Hunt


Honthorst introduced the theme of the flea hunt into Netherlandish painting. As with so many of Honthorst's genre scenes, an allusion to promiscuity and general playfulness is used, though here it is more directly referenced through the use of the flea hunt theme. From antiquity, the flea has been used as a symbol for sex owing to its proclivity to sucking blood from its targets. Writers as early as Aristotle, Pliny and Ovid, and continuing on to Honthorst's contemporaries John Donne, Peter Woodhouse and Christopher Marlowe, all wrote on the intimate and intense associations of the flea with sex. Honthorst eliminates any subtle innuendo here as he depicts the procuress helping the smiling, half naked woman search for fleas on her clothing, all lit by Honthorst's quintessential candlelight. Honthorst treated the subject in another painting, signed and dated 1628 (Dayton Art Institute, Ohio) which includes two peeping voyeurs in the background of the scene, yet another aid to the viewer in these otherwise not so subtle metaphors. 

[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 110 x 89.5 cm]

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