ANTOINE LE NAIN (LAON, c. 1588 – PARIS, 1648) Three Women with Three Children c. 1640 Oil on panel 29.5 x 36.5 cm. Certificate from René Millet Expertise. Three women pose alongside three little girls, or at least three children dressed in dresses, as were worn indiscriminately by both boys and girls until around the age of six . These three children are the main figures in the scene, although they are positioned on the right-hand side. Elegantly dressed in fine dresses worn over a white shirt, the lapels of which protrude from the sleeves, they look like miniature adults; the first child even wears a scalloped bib. Frozen in their three similar poses, arms by their sides, they stare at us, ready to curtsy. By comparison, the three adults on the left are more drab, probably the children’s servants: a nanny and a governess. Two of the women are seated, whilst a third moves about in the shadows at the back. We can make out nothing of this room, whose dark background draws our attention back to the foreground. To the whiteness of the tablecloth upon which a dish and a loaf of bread are placed. Whilst the colour palette is fairly limited, dominated by browns and greys, white plays a distinctive role, emphasising the presence of each figure with varying degrees of intensity, depending on their social standing. But it is indeed the red that draws our attention here to the figures we are meant to focus on: these three children from a wealthy 17th-century bourgeois family. Antoine Le Nain (1588–1648) was a French painter renowned for his so-called realistic genre paintings. Raised in a rural environment to which he remained deeply attached, Antoine was the eldest of two brothers, Louis and Mathieu, with whom he painted throughout his career. In 1629, the three brothers opened a studio in Paris and gained public acclaim thanks to the genre scenes in which they specialised. Whilst everyday life was a popular subject in European painting at the time, the Le Nain brothers’ style differed from the prevailing Caravaggist trend through the simplicity of their compositions and a restrained colour palette, favouring shades of grey and brown as seen in *Three Women with Three Children*. They focused on capturing intimacy and the warmth of the home, prioritising the expression on the faces over the proportions of the figures, which were sometimes rendered somewhat clumsily. This work, attributed solely to Antoine, is rather rare, probably because it was a special commission for a group portrait.