Outdoor Merriment with Wine and Song

Everyone at this garden party is dressed as though it were a century earlier. Lace collars, a ruff and broad plumed hats belong to the first half of the 17th century, and yet the panel was painted around 1740. The Belvedere explains the choice. Old-fashioned clothes lifted the scene out of the painter's own day and into the world of the older Netherlandish pictures his buyers admired. A woman plays the lute at a round table laid with a white cloth, glasses of red wine stand beside a cut lemon, and a dish of fruit waits on a stool. By a fountain crowned with a sea god holding a trident, a boy pours wine into a glass, and a carafe stands in the basin. The museum owns a companion panel of the same size, Outdoor Merriment with Dance.