Cornelis Bega's career lasted barely a decade, cut short by his death at thirty-two in the Haarlem plague of 1664, yet the Dutch genre painter and biographer Arnold Houbraken singled him out as the "first and best pupil" of Adriaen van Ostade, high praise given the number of significant painters who passed through Van Ostade's Haarlem workshop. Born in Haarlem in 1631 or 1632, Bega inherited a genuine artistic pedigree: his maternal grandfather was Cornelis van Haarlem, one of the leading Dutch Mannerist history painters of the previous generation, and Bega grew up around the extensive art collection this connection brought into the family. He adopted the surname Bega professionally, in place of his father's name, Begijn, a sculptor and goldsmith.
Under Van Ostade, Bega absorbed the loose, dark, boisterously peopled genre scenes of Dutch peasant life for which his master was celebrated, before developing a distinct manner of his own: greater monumentality in individual figures, an occasional classicising quality that likely owed something to the Haarlem painters Salomon and Jan de Bray, and, from the later 1650s, smaller and more highly finished compositions influenced by the Leiden fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris. In the spring of 1653 he undertook a Grand Tour through Germany, Switzerland and France with three fellow Haarlem painters, a journey recorded in the surviving diaries of one of his travelling companions, Vincent van der Vinne, which give an unusually detailed picture of the artistic circles the group encountered along the way. Bega joined the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke in 1654 and remained unmarried until his early death, his sensitive, closely observed treatment of individual figures leaving a discernible influence on later genre painters including Jan Steen and Cornelis Dusart.
The painting by Bega held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of a young woman with a wine glass, dated 1663, belongs to the final year of his working life and to the smaller, more intimately observed manner of his mature period, offering a late and characteristic example of an artist whose brief career nonetheless left a lasting mark on the Dutch Golden Age genre tradition.