Gerrit Dou’s The Flute Player — offered at auction for the first time in 125 years

There’s a story about Gerrit Dou that has been much repeated across the centuries. It involves a visitor to his studio who praised Dou’s fingernail-sized depiction of a broomstick. The painter responded with thanks, but said that it would take three further days’ work before the broomstick was complete.

This story may be apocryphal, but it reflects the perfectionism for which Dou has always been renowned — and his meticulous approach to painting, whether he was producing genre scenes, still lifes or portraits.

Like his master, Rembrandt, he was one of the most successful Dutch artists of the 17th century. Demand for his work was high and widespread, its collectors including Charles II of England and Cosimo III de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The contemporary Danish scholar Ole Borch described Dou as a painter ‘unequalled in the Netherlands and even in all other countries of the world’. The extent of his fame was all the more impressive given that, across a life of 61 years, Dou barely left his home city of Leiden.

Musicians appear throughout his oeuvre, and on 2 December 2025, The Flute Player — his first depiction of a musician — will lead the Old Masters Evening Sale at Christie’s in London.

Born in 1613, Dou was the son of a glass engraver. He trained at an early age in his father’s profession, and it’s widely suggested that his microscopic eye for detail was honed at that time.

Rembrandt was also from Leiden, and Dou began his education as a painter in the senior artist’s workshop, aged 14. He remained there for three or four years — until 1631, when Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam.

The Flute Player dates from later that decade, around 1632-35, by which time Dou was an independent master, with a style and a studio of his own. He made his own brushes, for example, preferring them very small, so as to help render his brushwork invisible. He liked smooth, highly finished surfaces, and to that end also chose to work on wood rather than canvas, as the latter had too much give.

In the picture coming to auction, a young man plays a flute while seated at a table. Though indoors, he wears a fur-trimmed tabard to keep off the cold, and a beret with bird-of-paradise feathers attached to it. His face is lit by sunlight entering the room through a window to the left.

It’s a room with little empty space. A terrestrial globe and two large books rest on the table. Behind the musician, a violin hangs on a wall, and a host of other objects can be seen on shelves — revealed by a curtain that has been pulled to one side.

By packing the scene so full, Dou showcased his skill at capturing a variety of materials, textures and reflections with great realism. In the top-left alone, one can pore over the fabric of the curtain, the wood grain of the violin, the flaking of the plasterwork by the window, and the cracks in some of the panes.

Dou’s approach to painting proved influential. He went on to found the school of Leiden-based artists known as the Fijnschilders (literally ‘fine painters’), who specialised in smallish-scale, minutely detailed paintings like The Flute Player. These artists included Frans van Mieris the Elder and Gottfried Schalcken.

From early in his career, Dou received an annual stipend of 500 guilders from the Swedish ambassador to the Dutch Republic, Pieter Spiering. This was simply for the privilege of having first refusal when the painter made a new work. Spiering was a keen art collector himself, though he also seems to have acquired works by Dou for Queen Christina in Stockholm.

In 1660, after the ambassador’s death, two pictures by the artist — one of which has been identified as The Young Mother, today part of the Mauritshuis’s collection in The Hague — were included in the ‘Dutch Gift’. This was a selection of paintings, sculptures and furniture sent by the Dutch to Charles II as a present, to mark the restoration of England’s monarchy.

The English writer John Evelyn observed that Dou’s pictures were painted ‘so finely as hardly to be at all distinguished from Enamail [enamel]’. The king was impressed, too, and invited the painter to London to work at the royal court. Dou declined, however, opting to stay in Leiden.

It should be pointed out that there was far more to Dou’s art than verisimilitude. His work is open to rich symbolic interpretation, and The Flute Player is no exception. The most obvious symbolism comes courtesy of the flute, whose music is by nature fleeting, a point reinforced by the other vanitas elements — the hourglass, violin, books and globes — which together underscore the transience of time, knowledge and worldly ambition.

By turning away from the large open book on the table — depicting Tobias curing his father’s blindness from the Book of Tobit — the young musician introduces a further moral dimension, setting up the tension between earthly pleasures and spiritual devotion. The Dutch heading above the illustration, which appears to read ‘How the priests serve’, suggests that the volume is a Catholic lectionary or service book.

Also of note are the two globes: one on the table, one on the top shelf. The Latin word for ‘sea’, mare, can be read in capital letters on the former, identifying it as a terrestrial (rather than a celestial) globe. The symbolism relates to global expansion.

Over the course of the 17th century, the Dutch grew wealthier and more powerful, using their naval prowess to dominate international trade. The feathers in the musician’s beret, for example, came from an exotic bird native to New Guinea, an island in Oceania where, by Dou’s day, the Dutch East India Company exerted influence.

In a vanitas painting, terrestrial globes served as a warning that no earthly conquest can overcome the inevitability of death. It’s worth bearing in mind that Dou started his career in the wake of the plague epidemic of the mid-1620s, which killed a fifth of Leiden’s population. In such a context, death would have seemed a very imminent threat indeed.

Seen in this light, The Flute Player emerges as far more than an exercise in virtuosity: it is a thoughtful, finely wrought meditation on the nature of looking, interpretation and time. It is little wonder that Dou’s paintings were prized then — and remain so now.

Leiden has a number of claims to fame. Among them is having established one of Europe’s earliest botanical gardens — where, incidentally, the first Dutch tulips were planted. Leiden also boasts the oldest university in the Netherlands, which opened in 1575. Freethinking scholars and scientists were attracted to the city in large numbers thereafter, and Dou could duly count on a sophisticated clientele in his home town who appreciated his pictorial aims.

Demand for his work continued into the 18th century. Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia, for instance, saw off stiff competition to purchase a triptych called The Nursery — only for it to be lost en route to her in a shipwreck in 1771 (a story told in the book The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure).

Fast-forward to the 19th century, and The Flute Player (whose early provenance is unknown) was acquired by a series of eminent British collectors before coming into the possession of William Proby, 5th Earl of Carysfort. The painting was at Elton Hall, his family seat in Cambridgeshire, by 1900 and has remained in his family until the present day. It now comes to the market for the first time in more than 125 years.

The Old Masters Evening Sale is on view from 27 November until 2 December 2025 at Christie’s in London

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