Duet between a Singer and a Theorbo Player

Netscher painted this panel almost square. In the 18th century it was enlarged into an upright rectangle and set in a frame with an arched top, so that it would hang as a pair with another arched picture by him. The two reached the French crown together in 1742, when Louis XV bought them from the heirs of Victor-Amédée of Savoy, prince of Carignan, a collector living in Paris.

Its older titles, The Singing Lesson and The Interrupted Duet, show how earlier owners read it. A young woman in white satin sits with a sheet of music in her hands, the theorbo player of the title is at the table on the right, and a second woman stands behind. Netscher signed the paper the seated woman holds, but the signature can no longer be read. In the shadows stands a statue. Older catalogues called it Hercules and Antaeus, but it repeats Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines, set up in Florence in 1583, and the Louvre reads it as sharpening the amorous undertone that music so often carried in such scenes.

The date comes from a drawing in the Petit Palais in Paris, inscribed 1664, which shows the same figures against a completely different background.