The Oyster Eater

The Oyster Eater, also known as Girl Offering Oysters, is a small oil-on-panel genre painting by the Dutch artist Jan Steen, made around 1658 to 1660 and held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1936. It shows a young woman salting oysters while looking directly out at the viewer with a flirtatious expression, using oysters, a traditional symbol of desire, to carry a theme of earthly lust. Steen frames the scene through an archway in the doorsien manner, a device for creating depth associated with Leiden fine painters such as Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder, whose meticulous technique the painting's small size and careful detail closely echo. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/