About this work
Two children crowd the picture plane: a boy grips an eel in one hand while clutching a protesting kitten in his arm; a girl simultaneously pulls the kitten's tail and directs her gaze — and a wagging finger — straight at the viewer. Both children grin, teeth showing, the boy's eyes sliding sideways as if aware he's being caught out.
The eel is small and translucent; the kitten, a wide-eyed grey tabby. The palette is warm and close — earthy ochres, soft flesh tones, and the neutral ground of a plain background that keeps all attention on the figures and their barely-contained mischief. Leyster has captured the boy's half-guilty, half-unashamed expression as he teases the cat — he seems to be testing just how far he can go. The composition is compact and almost theatrical, every element tilted toward a single suspended moment before something gives way.
Painted in 1635, the work is an oil painting now held in the National Gallery, London.
Between 1629 and 1635, Leyster seems to have worked steadily, producing much of the oeuvre we know today — and this painting arrives at the peak of that run. Children's activities were commonly used in Dutch seventeenth-century painting to point out the bad behaviour of adults, and it has been suggested that Leyster's picture was intended to serve as both delightful entertainment and a warning.
Both animals held significance surrounding behaviors that separated the moral from the immoral; cats and eels were used in baiting pastimes, and paired with the children, Leyster's choice of animals raised multiple moral questions and allowed for multiple interpretations, making the work widely appealing and setting her apart in a tight market for genre paintings.
Some scholars have argued it represents the Dutch proverb "Een aal bij de staart hebben" — "to hold an eel by the tail" — meaning you do not get to keep something just because you have it.
Leyster's paintings tend to remain ambiguous and subtle, encouraging viewers to draw their own conclusions.
This is a painting that rewards a wall where people linger — a hallway, a study, a room where conversation happens. Thanks to Leyster's skill at rendering the complexities of human emotion and expression, even in small children, both the delights of childlike wonder and the looming consequences of curiosity simultaneously shine through. It speaks to viewers who enjoy art that does more than one thing at once: the image is immediately funny, immediately warm, and quietly unsettling in the way that only the best Dutch genre painting manages to be. The small format suits intimate
