Compañía musical

This is one of Rembrandt's earliest dated pictures, painted in 1626 when he was about 20 and still working in his home town of Leiden, years before Amsterdam and fame. He filled it with borrowed finery and instruments, and with faces he had to hand: his own mother sat for the older woman at the back, and his own features turn up among the young players. The bright, almost gaudy colour and the crowded tabletop of books and vessels belong to a painter still trying things on. People have argued ever since over what it means, whether a call to praise God in music or a quieter scene of seduction, with the old woman as a go-between. The instruments and open songbook were common signs of pleasures that don't last.