The Lute Player

Most painted musicians are caught in the middle of a song. This young woman is still tuning. She bends over the lute with music books open in front of her, turning a peg and listening to the string. In Dutch painting of the time a music-maker could also stand for one of the five senses, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum suggests that this one, testing the pitch before she begins, stands for hearing. Ter Brugghen painted her in Utrecht around 1626 or 1627, with a turban wound round her head and the light falling across her face and shoulder. The canvas belonged to the Dietrichstein princes, a noble family whose seat was the castle of Mikulov in southern Moravia, and the museum bought it from their collection in 1953.