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. It depicts a man offering a plate of oysters to a woman he is trying to seduce. The painting was stolen from a bank vault in the Netherlands in 1945, and identified as Nazi plunder while held by the City of London Corporation in 2017. After its return to the descendants of its former owners, it was sold by Sotheby's in 2018 for £1.6m, with the auction catalogue describing it as "one of Ochtervelt's finest surviving works". The painting measures . Its subject is usually interpreted as a seduction scene, charged with erotic meaning: a solicitous young man is offering a plate of oysters – an aphrodisiac and symbol of sexual pleasure – to a smiling young woman. Both are wearing fine clothes: the man has elaborate silver embroidery on the cuffs of his coat; and the woman wears a light blue silk gown with jacket of scarlet velvet trimmed with white fur. She may be a well-dressed courtesan, with her unmade bed in the shadowed background. Incidental details suggest something is awry. She is distractedly spilling drops from her glass of wine held precariously between her right finger and thumb: the drops are falling towards a spaniel waiting to drink; a bird cage hangs empty, the bird has flown; and a distressed chair in the foreground has a knob missing on one side, with some fraying upholstery coming unstitched. There is a pewter jug on the table. The details allow Ochtervelt to show his mastery of the effects of light falling on pewter, glass, fur and textiles. The subject of an oyster meal was painted by other Dutch artists, including Jan Steen, Frans van Mieris the Elder, and Gabriel Metsu. Jacob Ochtervelt painted other versions of the same subject, including an example of 1663-35 held by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and another of 1667 held by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The work was owned by Charles de Morny, Duke of Morny in Paris, and then sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1874 for 6,000 Francs. It was owned by Henry Louis Bischoffsheim in London, and sold after his death to Alphons Preyer, and then to Frederik Muller.