Couple with Matchmaker

The matchmaker in the middle of this little scene belongs to a subject painters had worked for over a century before Platzer took it up around 1750. In Dutch painting a hundred years earlier, the procuress who brokered a meeting between a young woman and a paying suitor was a warning, and the coins on the table meant love had a price the viewer was meant to disapprove of. Platzer, working in Vienna for wealthy collectors, drains that lesson out of it. Here the bargain is simply entertainment, all silk and wine and glinting detail, the older woman leaning in to seal the arrangement while the couple play their parts. It is painted in oil on a sheet of copper barely larger than a book, which is why the colour stays this bright and the smallest folds keep their edge. Look for the money changing hands. The exchange the whole subject once turned on is still here, now just one more shining thing among the finery.