The Oyster Meal

The Oyster Meal is an oil on canvas genre painting by the Dutch Golden Age artist Jacob Ochtervelt, dated to around 1664–65.

The subject of an oyster meal was painted by other Dutch artists, including Jan Steen, Frans van Mieris the Elder, and Gabriel Metsu.

It passed through the hands of the Galerie van Diemen, and J. Teixeira de Mattos, and then the firm of the art dealer Daniël Katz in Dieren.

[6] After the Netherlands was invaded in 1940 by Nazi Germany, Smidt van Gelder secured his collection of 25 paintings in the vault of the Arnhem branch of the Amsterdamsche Bank (now part of ABN AMRO).

Arnhem was forcibly cleared of its population and looted by the occupying German forces in the aftermath of the Operation Market Garden in September 1944, and the painting was one of 14 of Smidt van Gelder's artworks stolen from the bank vault in January 1945 by looters from Gaukommando Düsseldorf led by Helmut Temmler.

[1] It as bought by J. William Middendorf II,[6] and held in Washington DC before it came into the possession of the art dealer Edward Speelman, who sold it in 1971 to the property developer and entrepreneur Harold Samuel.