Known as "Il Pitocchetto" or the Beggar Painter because of his realistic paintings of peasants wearing rags, Giacomo Ceruti was active in Northern Italy during the late Baroque period in Italy. Although his primary subjects are 'low-life' persons, they are depicted with dignity and self possession.

An art historian has described these paintngs "as confronting us with the detritus of the community; the displaced and homeless poor; the old and the young with their ubiquitous spindles, eloquent signs of their situationless poverty and unwanted labor; orphans in their orderly, joyless asylums plying their unpaid toil; urchins of the streets eking out small coins as porters and sating them in gambling; the diseased,...