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Lot Essay
One of the most accomplished painters of domestic genre scenes during the Dutch Golden Age, Pieter de Hooch produced paintings that subtly respond to the expressive effects of light and successfully define complex spatial arrangements, often including views through a doorway or window. Following his move from Delft to Amsterdam in 1660, de Hooch gradually began to introduce musical parties, generally depicted as either family groups or male and female pairs, as a prominent subject in his painted oeuvre. Among the thirty or so paintings by de Hooch to treat this theme, the earliest of these is probably the Family Portrait Group Making Music of 1663 in the Cleveland Museum of Art (see Sutton, op. cit., no. 53).
Images of music-makers carried connotations of intimate, at times amorous, affections and were popular with a number of artists producing high-life genre paintings in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, among them Frans van Mieris, Caspar Netscher, Gerard ter Borch and Jan Steen. Instruction in music (and dance) was a standard feature of an upper-class education in the seventeenth-century. The lute-playing woman at the center of de Hooch’s composition is dressed in a costly white satin dress and casually sits on a table draped in an expensive Ottoman carpet. Here, a rather more drably dressed standing man plays a violin while gazing at a book of sheet music and is probably an instructor, rather than suitor. This point is perhaps made all the more clear by the woman’s wistful gaze away from the man, as if she is contemplating a lover who does not feature in the painting. A third figure, a page, is carrying a chair before a window framed by a pair of Corinthian pilasters which opens to the roofline of another building.
Sutton (op. cit.) rightly characterized this painting as ‘one of the artist’s most fanciful compositions’ (loc. cit.), noting that at left the architecture abruptly, and rather improbably, opens onto a river with a boat. He further drew a comparison between the posture of the woman in the present painting and another figure in more-or-less mirror image that appears in a painting of circa 1667-70 in the Taft Museum, Cincinnati (op. cit., no. 78).
Images of music-makers carried connotations of intimate, at times amorous, affections and were popular with a number of artists producing high-life genre paintings in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, among them Frans van Mieris, Caspar Netscher, Gerard ter Borch and Jan Steen. Instruction in music (and dance) was a standard feature of an upper-class education in the seventeenth-century. The lute-playing woman at the center of de Hooch’s composition is dressed in a costly white satin dress and casually sits on a table draped in an expensive Ottoman carpet. Here, a rather more drably dressed standing man plays a violin while gazing at a book of sheet music and is probably an instructor, rather than suitor. This point is perhaps made all the more clear by the woman’s wistful gaze away from the man, as if she is contemplating a lover who does not feature in the painting. A third figure, a page, is carrying a chair before a window framed by a pair of Corinthian pilasters which opens to the roofline of another building.
Sutton (op. cit.) rightly characterized this painting as ‘one of the artist’s most fanciful compositions’ (loc. cit.), noting that at left the architecture abruptly, and rather improbably, opens onto a river with a boat. He further drew a comparison between the posture of the woman in the present painting and another figure in more-or-less mirror image that appears in a painting of circa 1667-70 in the Taft Museum, Cincinnati (op. cit., no. 78).