Unequal Love

In 1814 the Torlonia, a family of Roman bankers, listed this canvas in their inventory as a man in a hat playing the guitar, with bags of coins on the table, and credited it to the Flemish painter Jan Boeckhorst. There was no woman in that description. An old woman had been hidden long before under a dark layer of paint, because she was thought scandalous, and she came back only when restorers removed it in the 1950s. Seen whole, the picture turns around a favourite subject of Dutch painters, the ill-matched couple. Usually an old man offers money to a young woman. Here an old woman holds out a purse and a ring to the young lute player, while gold coins lie counted out on the table. Judith Leyster painted it in Haarlem in the early 1630s. When the Torlonia gave it to the Italian state in 1892, it was still the man with the guitar.