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Art Talk Live: Love at the Margins—De Gheyn’s Roma Woman with a Child

This drawing depicts a woman, seen in profile, facing the left. She wears a hooded cape and kneels beside a small child. The woman places her proper right hand on the child’s back and in her other hand holds the child’s proper left hand.
Jacques de Gheyn II, Dutch, A Roma Woman with a Child, c. 1604. Brown ink and black chalk on light tan antique laid paper. The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gift of George Abrams in memory of Maida Stocker Abrams, 2020.208.

Gallery Talk

This event was recorded. Please view the talk here.

Members of the itinerant Roma, or Romani, people arrived in Europe by the Middle Ages and have held a prominent place in Western art and literature, from the work of Shakespeare and Hieronymus Bosch to that of the many Roma artists and writers active today. This talk will focus on an unusual and moving depiction of a Roma woman and child by Dutch artist Jacques de Gheyn, exploring it in relation to the broader visual and literary tradition and to the realities of the lives of the Roma in the 17th-century Netherlands.

Led by:
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow, Division of European and American Art

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Free admission, but registration is required. To register, please complete this online form.

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Art Talks Live are presented via Zoom every other Thursday afternoon at 2pm and offer an up-close look at works from our collections with our team of curators, conservators, fellows, and graduate students.

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