The Concert: Singer and Theorbo Player

A woman in white satin sits reading from a sheet of music. At the left a man stands with a theorbo, a lute with a second, longer neck for the bass strings, and on the right a page boy brings in a tray. It is a small private concert, the kind of scene ter Borch returned to again and again in the 1650s, and the Louvre dates this one to around 1657. The panel is rounded at the top. Ter Borch put his initials, G T B, on the rail of the chair, and they are now barely legible. The picture belonged to the French kings and passed to the nation in 1793, the year the Louvre first opened as a public museum.