Waterloo Puppets — Oil on Canvas, by Margaretha Verheus, 1969

The Dolls Are Watching. (Politely. For Now)

Amsterdam, 1969. The Waterlooplein flea market in its golden, gloriously chaotic prime — the city's great treasure-hunting ground, where somebody's beloved doll collection ends up hung on a blue chair, blinking at passers-by, waiting to be taken home. Margaretha Verheus painted exactly that corner, and we are quietly, happily haunted by it.

An elephant mid-tumble in orange. A teddy with a thousand-yard stare. Baby dolls, puppets, a red-waistcoated fellow presiding over the lot with the calm of something that has seen every buyer come and go — and an impeccably dressed woman in a scarlet skirt. Is she passing through, or is she one of them? Painted stiff, staring straight ahead, standing a little too still... who's to say where the collection ends and the crowd begins? Look up, and a stray pair of little pink legs dangles in from the top edge, feet swinging, the rest of the puppet cheekily cropped away by the frame — as if it climbed out of the picture while no one was looking. The market, she's telling us, goes on well beyond the canvas. So does the watching!

There's something wonderfully art brut about it — flattened, folkloric, faintly uncanny in the way only a room full of dolls can be. That flicker at the edge of your eye. The sense that if you turned the lights off, they'd rearrange themselves. Which is precisely the charm. This is not a pretty picture that asks nothing of you; it's a character piece with a pulse — and possibly a heartbeat or two it isn't admitting to.

Oil on canvas, signed M. Verheus and inscribed on the reverse Waterlooplein 1969.

By a genuine, museum-collected Dutch painter — her work hangs in the Rijksmuseum — and by, we're delighted to say, a woman. In quite exceptional vintage condition: the colours as fresh and unfaded as if the canvas had never met a ray of daylight, or had only just been carried out of the atelier. Presented in its original gilded frame, ready to unsettle and delight your wall in equal measure.

Eccentric, colourful, and entirely at home among the well-loved oddities. Do come closer. They'd like that!

Waterloo Puppets — Margaretha Verheus (1905–1990) — Oil on Canvas, signed, Waterlooplein 1969 — original gilded frame.

PS. We tried photographing it somewhere normal. The dolls insisted otherwise.