Woman with chicken

At Côte d'Opale, an auction house in Boulogne-sur-Mer, they sell on 18 April a "Dutch School, 17th century" portrait of a woman with a chicken, estimated at 1,500 to 2,000 Euro.

I can't find fault with that description, and the estimate seems low, for a painting which needs some TLC but could turn out to be quite special. The painting is done in the loose, nearly expressionistic style favoured by only a few of their portraitists, most famously Frans Hals but also e.g. Rembrandt and Carel Fabritius (his "head of a boy" pictured, from wikigallery.org). While I don't think it is by any of those, it still is a very well painted portrait, where the individuality of the woman and the characteristics of her face are captured with only a few well-placed brushstrokes, and the hands show the roughness of a farmer, not the finesse of the nobility usually portrayed. Could it be by Abraham van Diepenbeeck? His "Portrait of an old Jew" in the Antwerp Museum seems similar.

The painting is damaged and very dirty, so it's a gamble what can be made of it eventually. But it is the kind of gamble that could pay off quite nicely, and it is a much better painting than the usual copies, derivations, and third-rate painters one finds for these prices (at auction and on this blog, in all fairness).