A young man playing a lute and singing with two companions

Jan van Bijlert was amongst the most prominent Utrecht Caravaggisti, a group of artists who brought the revolutionary style of Caravaggio to the Northern Netherlands. Like his slightly older contemporaries Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen, and Gerard van Honthorst, Bijlert was deeply influenced by his travels to Italy. By 1621, he was recorded in Rome, where he joined the Bentvueghels, an informal society of Dutch and Flemish artists. Bijlert returned to Utrecht in 1624, where he encountered a city steeped in the dramatic tenebrism and dynamic compositions characteristic of Caravaggism. Following the deaths of Baburen in 1624 and ter Brugghen in 1629, Biljert turned to the softened naturalism and more classicizing approach adopted by Honthorst, characterized by its clearer forms and lighter palettes.

The Young Man Playing a Lute and Singing with two Companions reflects this development and aligns closely with Bijert’s Lute player in a private collection, dated by Paul Huys Janssen to 1625-30 (P. Janssen, Jan van Bijlert, 1998, p. 145, no. 124) and with his Company eating waffles and pancakes dated to the early 1630s (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig; Janssen, op. cit., p. 152, no. 140).

Musical subjects were popular in Utrecht painting of this period. Pictures of half-length musicians and singers illuminated by a concealed light source first appeared in the Netherlands in the works of Utrecht artists around 1620, such as Bloemaert's innovative The flute player of 1621 now in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (inv. 6083b; J.R., Gerrit van Honthorst 1592-1659, Doornspijk, p. 16). From the sixteenth century, the subject of music-making had been commonly associated with love and harmony, and seventh-century Dutch artists embraced this trope (see E. Buijsen, The Hoogsteder exhibition of music & painting in the golden age, The Hague and Zwolle, 1994).