Lute Player

For well over 150 years this young man with his lute was sold as a van Dyck. In 1808 he hung in Rome in the gallery of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, listed as the guitar player by Vandick, and in London he was lent to the big van Dyck exhibitions of 1887 and 1900 as the master's own work. The name changed only after the Boston museum bought the picture from the London dealers Colnaghi in 1934. It now goes under Jean de Reyn, a lesser-known painter from Dunkirk, and even that comes with the cautious word attributed. The sitter is dressed in black with a broad white collar and sits on a plain wooden chair, plucking the strings of a lute whose pegbox bends sharply back. The brightest thing in the picture is the pale, loose boot-hose folded down over the tops of his boots.