"Dutch, ca. 1670" is copy after Vincenzo Campi (or someone close to him)

Henry's, from Germany, sells on 27 October 2018 a "Dutch, ca. 1670 early Baroque painting" of children feeding a cat, estimated at 450 Euro.

As I have already treated that topic, albeit with better paintings, in some earlier blog posts, I took more interest in this one than the actual quality warranted. And sure enough, a much better version of this composition already appeared in my post of December 2016. It was sold at Gros & Delettrez in 2012 with an estimate of 2,000 Euro, and attributed to a follower of Vincenzo Campi.

The current one is charming, and 450 Euro is not a lot for such a work, but it probably isn't Dutch.

Unlikely paintings

At Marques de Santos, a Portuguese auction house, they sell two Italian School 16th-17th century paintings, lot 374 and 375, with an old(?) attribution to Bernardino Campi. They are estimated at 2,400 Euro each. UPDATE: not sold, apparently most people had misgivings about these...

It seems unlikely, and I couldn't immediately find other examples, that upper-class women (viz. the clothing, especially the lace collar) would be painted doing the work of maids. The type of jolly plump girl with rosy cheeks at work is well-known, in the work of e.g Joachim Beuckelaer or indeed Bernardino Campi. But these girls are clothed as lower-class people (with often some spice added by strategic unbuttoning), not the nobility or rich bourgeoisie that wore the more elaborate clothes.

So why the discrepancy here? My gut feeling is that some faker (19th century or much more recent) wanted to give his paintings all possible checkmarks on the 16th century box, by style of painting, subject, and clothing, but didn't realise that some of those didn't match.

Whatever the case, the quality is certainly not good enough to warrant any attribution to Campi, which the auction house wisely didn't do.