Musical company around a table in a garden

By the 1540s Benson had a busy Bruges workshop turning out altarpieces and portraits, and then he did something new for the town. He took up the worldly subject of a well-dressed company making music out of doors, and as far as we can tell he was the first in Bruges to paint it. Here a group sits around a table laid with wine and fruit in a garden, a lute and a flute among them. The younger Pieter Pourbus, the leading Bruges painter of the next generation, took the motif straight from him. The subject clearly sold: Benson returned to it again and again, and about ten of these garden concerts from his hand are on record.