Gabriël Metsu’s parents had to do a lot of marrying around before they could get on an altar together.

Metsu’s dad was stepping into his third marriage and his mum into her second. His dad was a painter and his mum was a midwife with a thing for artists. Her first two husbands had been painters, and we thought we were following a pattern here, but her third husband was a skipper. Those are probably the two most exciting careers of 17th-century Dutch countries, painting and sea exploring. 

Metsu’s paperwork is all over the place. It hasn’t exactly been easy for historians to figure out what Metsu did in his younger days. It seems he had a bunch of teachers, one of them he shared with Jan Steen. He lived in Leiden for a long time and then he moved to Amsterdam. That last bit can be corroborated by Guild records. Everything else could just be a time travel accident.

Gabriel Metsu painted genre scenes for the merchant class, much like Vermeer. In fact, the New York Times called him a “lesser Vermeer." I understand that this guy was a pastiche of his more famous colleagues, but his work was his own. It was like the time Led Zeppelin was sued for plagiarizing "Stairway to Heaven." They may or may not have stolen it, but they made the song unforgettable. Now no one even cares that the song was stolen. Metsu, unfortunately, did the opposite. In the 18th century, Metsu was the gold standard of the Dutch Golden age, but 200 years later Vermeer took over. Now we see Vermeer in Metsu’s paintings, back then they saw Metsu in Vermeer’s paintings. Tough break.