拍品专文
This painting, which is dated 1628, the year in which Honthorst departed his native Utrecht for a monthslong stay in England, reflects the artist’s changing approach to his art in the second half of the 1620s. In addition to distinctly Caravaggesque pictures – strikingly illuminated compositions, often with illusionistic effects, that recall the time he spent in Italy in the 1610s – Honthorst expanded his visual repertoire to include exuberantly coloured classicizing or pastoral subjects that reflected the growing taste for such works among courtly circles of Dutch society. Though conceived largely in the earthen tones that prevailed in his earlier work, Honthorst has here similarly introduced passages of bright local colour, including the woman’s yellow sleeves and cap and her double-stranded coral necklace.
Honthorst has staged his protagonists behind a table draped in a green cloth on which can be seen a music book and lute on its side. In their catalogue raisonné, J. Richard Judson and Rudolf E.O. Ekkart posit that the painting may represent the sense of Hearing (op. cit., p. 197). In seventeenth-century literature, particularly the ever-popular picaresque novel, correspondence was drawn between love and colourful characters making music. In turn, musical instruments became a conventional motif in such Caravaggesque brothel scenes and conveyed a not particularly thinly veiled meaning. As Wayne Franits has observed, scantily-clad young women touching the rounded belly of a lute would have connoted to contemporary viewers the implicit sexuality (and fecundity) of the female body (op. cit., p. 118). Such images must have appealed immensely to connoisseurs, who likely concerned themselves less with moralistic warnings about succumbing to carnal appetites than the titillation inherent in such imagery.
Judson and Ekkart have further pointed out that the courtesan in the present painting is closely akin to the young woman who appears in a pair of Honthorst’s most successful pictures in the period, the Smiling girl (St. Louis Art Museum) and Procuress (Utrecht, Centraal Museum), both executed in 1625 (op. cit.). Further connections can be drawn with Hendrick ter Brugghen’s celebrated Duet (fig. 1; Paris, Musée du Louvre), which dates to the same year as the present painting and likewise shows a young woman in extreme décolleté with a lute and music book seen in the painting’s foreground.
The present painting probably formed part of the famed collection assembled by the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, from which it appears to have been gifted in the early twentieth century. When it emerged on the market in 1989, it achieved a world record price for any painting by Honthorst at auction (£264,000). The price would not be exceeded until the sale of the Merry musician with violin under his left arm, a painting that graces the front cover of the catalogue raisonné for the artist, nearly a decade later.
Honthorst has staged his protagonists behind a table draped in a green cloth on which can be seen a music book and lute on its side. In their catalogue raisonné, J. Richard Judson and Rudolf E.O. Ekkart posit that the painting may represent the sense of Hearing (op. cit., p. 197). In seventeenth-century literature, particularly the ever-popular picaresque novel, correspondence was drawn between love and colourful characters making music. In turn, musical instruments became a conventional motif in such Caravaggesque brothel scenes and conveyed a not particularly thinly veiled meaning. As Wayne Franits has observed, scantily-clad young women touching the rounded belly of a lute would have connoted to contemporary viewers the implicit sexuality (and fecundity) of the female body (op. cit., p. 118). Such images must have appealed immensely to connoisseurs, who likely concerned themselves less with moralistic warnings about succumbing to carnal appetites than the titillation inherent in such imagery.
Judson and Ekkart have further pointed out that the courtesan in the present painting is closely akin to the young woman who appears in a pair of Honthorst’s most successful pictures in the period, the Smiling girl (St. Louis Art Museum) and Procuress (Utrecht, Centraal Museum), both executed in 1625 (op. cit.). Further connections can be drawn with Hendrick ter Brugghen’s celebrated Duet (fig. 1; Paris, Musée du Louvre), which dates to the same year as the present painting and likewise shows a young woman in extreme décolleté with a lute and music book seen in the painting’s foreground.
The present painting probably formed part of the famed collection assembled by the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, from which it appears to have been gifted in the early twentieth century. When it emerged on the market in 1989, it achieved a world record price for any painting by Honthorst at auction (£264,000). The price would not be exceeded until the sale of the Merry musician with violin under his left arm, a painting that graces the front cover of the catalogue raisonné for the artist, nearly a decade later.