Music-Making Company on a Terrace

In 1622 an Amsterdam printer published the great songbook of Gerbrand Bredero, a poet whose love songs had made him famous before his death four years earlier. Songs of courtship were in demand in the Dutch Republic, and in the early 1620s Dirck Hals painted the kind of company that sang them. On a terrace in a garden or park, young people in costly clothes make music together, and one of them stands out in an outfit of brilliant scarlet. Viewers at the time would have caught the meaning straight away. Music depends on harmony, and so does love. These revellers are openly flirting, though, and at their feet even the dogs are sniffing each other.