An elegant company with musicians seated at a table with fruit and wine, in a landscape

Benson's Concert genres, with their flute and lute players, frolicking couples and wealth of still-life details, were clearly popular: Marlier records no less than ten different Concerts apres le repas (see Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruges au temps de Charles-Quint, Damme, 1957, pp. 313-15, nos. 114-123, pls. LX.-LXIV.). This composition, which was published by Marlier in 1966, includes many of the characteristic elements and relates most closely in its arrangement of figures to Benson's Concert in Kunstmuseum Basel (Marlier, op. cit., 1957, p. 313, no. 114, pl. LXI), the main difference being the amorous couple in the right foreground of this painting, who replace a moorish servant holding a flute in the Basel Concert. Benson's motif was to influence the leading Bruges artist of the next generation, Pieter Pourbus, whose complex Allegory of True Love (London, Wallace Collection) is clearly compositionally derived from Benson's Concerts. The present picture may represent an important transitional step between the earlier Benson versions and the Pourbus, in that it seems to distinguish between different types of lovers and different types of love -- the chief interest of the Wallace picture.