File:Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem - A fool with two women.jpg

Literature: P.J.J. van Thiel, Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Davaco, Doornspijk 1999, pp. 115, 173, 379-380, no. 222, reproduced plate 117.
Condition: The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden, who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting was simply on canvas originally. The scalloping of the tacking edges is visible in places. It was presumably mounted on panel perhaps a century or so later when it might have needed lining. The panel joint clearly opened at some point, leaving a line of retouching across the upper third of the painting, running through the bridge of the Fool's nose, through the mouth of the central woman and the neck of the other. There is now a recent thick composite wooden backing, finished with a veneer, behind. Apart from a build up of old retouching along the split joint in the backing panel mentioned above, there is quite widespread old repaint including round all the edges. Elsewhere old fashioned broad brush strokes of overpaint seem to have been added sometimes apparently more or less gratuitously, or widely overlapping original paint. Although there was one old many sided tear across the yellow drapery of the Fool's sleeve. Fortunately much perfectly unworn paint remains intact immediately alongside a patch of heavy repaint. In the heads this can be seen clearly: for instance in the woman on the left the fine craquelure and delicate glazed modelling of the upper part of her face is in beautiful condition, with a dark patch of overpaint across her nose, equally the central woman is also finely intact apart from the line across her mouth and some dark old repaint down the outer sides of her face. The mannerist drama of the Fool's expression is also largely well preserved apart from the retouching along the line across his nose, as is his staff. The base edge has much old repaint but the monogram and date appears largely intact if worn. There is some wear in the hands, as also in the pink drapery of the central woman, with a patch of recent retouching just above her hand and arm where the sausage curling over in the lower centre in fact curls up again, had that (perhaps too suggestive) section not been touched out discreetly.
Catalogue Note: In its original state, revealed in an old photograph reproduced by van Thiel (see literature), a very long sausage emerges from under the Fool's left arm, passing through the caressing right fingers of the central maiden and ending limply above her right forearm. Presumably this was painted out in or after the mid-1950s to render the subject less suggestively lewd.

Van Thiel lists and reproduces (figs. 118, 119) two copies, both of whose whereabouts are unknown. He suggests that the rather large numbers of copies of this and other secular works from the 1590s attests to their popularity at the time.^[2]