The Music Lesson

Gerard Terborch specialized in small-scale portraits and scenes of everyday life, now known as genre scenes. His interiors provide an evocative setting for figures absorbed in the rituals of everyday life, with distracting domestic furniture kept to a minimum. His mature genre paintings deal with “high-life” subjects: officers and elegant young women conversing, making music, or exchanging letters. Here a lady plays an elaborate stringed instrument, the double-headed lute, while her companion marks the tempo for her. He is presumably her music master, but, as is typical for Terborch, the precise relationship of the figures remains tantalizingly ambiguous. (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)