A Merry Group behind a Balustrade

There are two of these. A canvas almost identical to this one, with the same man playing a violin, the same young woman with a lute and the same third figure behind them raising a glass and singing, has hung in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon since 1875, where it is known as The Singers. That twin makes the early history of the Boston picture hard to pin down. A wealthy Amsterdam silk merchant, David van Mollem, owned a merry company by Honthorst when he died in 1746. A painting of this composition was number 79 in the 1795 inventory of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, and in 1807 the king's nephew sold it to Prince Michał Radziwiłł. Which of the two canvases those records describe cannot be settled. From 1883 the trail is clear. A family in Lille, the Le Gavrians, kept the painting for about a century, and a note on its back records that one of them took it to his house in Versailles in 1925. Honthorst painted it around 1623 or 1624 and signed it with his initials joined in a monogram. Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo bought it in 2014 and gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 2019.