The Trumpet Player, with a Banquet Scene in the Background

A trumpeter in a plumed cap leans out of a stone window and blows, a blue banner with a fringe hanging from his instrument. Behind him, in a lit room, people sit feasting at a table. A gilded ewer stands on a dish at the left, an oriental carpet is thrown over the sill, and a heavy gold curtain is pulled aside at the right. Dou signed it on the balustrade, and the Louvre dates it to about 1660 to 1665.

Scholars have argued over how much meaning to read into all this. In one reading the trumpet recalls the trumpet of the Last Judgement, sounding over people busy eating and drinking, while the ewer stands for purity. Others answer that Dou was also showing off, painting brocade, wool and metal as finely as he could, and quoting things an educated buyer would recognise.

At an Amsterdam sale in 1757 the panel was offered together with a girl at a window by Dou, as though the two were a pair. They were not painted as one, and they stayed together only until the sale of the collector Gerret Braamcamp in 1771. The girl is now at Waddesdon Manor in England. The trumpeter was bought at auction in Amsterdam in 1783 on behalf of Louis XVI.