Soap Bubbles

There are three known autograph versions of Soap Bubbles, two in horizontal formats (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and the vertical composition in Washington. In each of the known versions, an adolescent boy leans on a window ledge fringed with vines and blows through a straw, intensely concentrating on the large soap bubble at its tip. A young child strains over the ledge to watch.

An engraving of the Soap Bubbles, published in 1739, matches none of the three extant paintings precisely. It seems most likely that there existed a fourth version, now lost.