Boy Singing

Hendrick ter Brugghen signed this canvas plainly at the centre right, HTBrugghen fecit 1627, with the first three letters joined. In 1957 it still hung under another name. Its owner, Sir Oliver Lambart of Beau Parc in County Meath, lent it that year to an exhibition of paintings from Irish collections at the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, and the catalogue gave it to Gerrit van Honthorst.

The mix-up had some logic. Honthorst and ter Brugghen both worked in Utrecht in the 1620s, both had spent years in Rome, and both painted single musicians half-length and close up. The scholars who catalogued ter Brugghen's work in 2007 even suggested that this may be the young man with a feathered hat singing from a book that was sold in Leipzig in 1819 and in Amsterdam in 1885, both times as Honthorst.

The boy holds an open music book over a table draped in yellow patterned cloth, his mouth open and his eyes on the page, one hand raised with the fingers spread. A white plume tumbles over his cap. A year after the Dublin show the picture was with dealers in London, and in October 1958 the New York firm Knoedler sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts for 27,000 dollars.