The Visit

This painting bears a particularly strong relationship to Gerard ter Borch's well-known and influential The Suitor's Visit of circa 1658 (fig. 1; National Gallery of Art, Washington). In both paintings, a suitor dressed in black enters through a doorway at left, doffs his cap, and bows to an elegant young woman dressed in a red bodice and white satin gown. The short sleeves of the woman's bodice and her corkscrew curls in Ochtervelt's painting allow for it to be dated to the early 1670s, an enormously productive chapter in the artist's career. As with the best of his compositions, however, there is a degree of ambiguity to the outcome of the narrative in the present work. The profusion of red employed in the curtains, the woman's bodice, the velvet upholstered chair at right and the costly oriental carpet implies the warmth of love and passion. Similarly, the small lapdog, who alertly sits on the chair and raises his paw to mirror the gentleman's own act of deference, as well as the bunch of grapes in the sumptuous silver bowl at right, signal to the attentive beholder the cavalier's seemingly fruitful attempts at courting the young lady.