Margareta de Heer

Margareta de Heer, born in Leeuwarden in 1603, was the daughter of the glass painter, Arjen Willems de Heer and sister to the artist, Gerrit Adriaensz. de Heer.  She trained with her father but chose to specialise in a different branch of art, painting refined gouaches like this one, on vellum.  Some forty such works are known, of which the earliest, a still-life with shells and insects in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, is dated 1644, and most appear to date from the 1650s.  The majority of Margareta de Heer's surviving gouaches represent either farmyard scenes or still-life compositions, and a depiction like this of a mythological subject is extremely rare.