Duet

Hendrick ter Brugghen belonged to a group of painters from Utrecht who had gone to Rome, fallen under the spell of Caravaggio's dramatic light, and carried that manner back to the Dutch Republic. He painted this duet in 1628: a singer and a lute player caught mid-performance, lit warmly from one side, their costumes a little theatrical. Music scenes like this were popular with Dutch collectors, who read them as images of the fleeting pleasures of the senses. Ter Brugghen handles the half-light and the glint on the lute with the ease of a man who had studied Caravaggio's own canvases first-hand. He died the next year, in 1629, only about forty years old, just as his reputation was rising.