A Lady Standing at a Virginal by Johannes Vermeer

A Lady Seated at a Virginal by Johannes Vermeer

Music

Music fills Vermeer's interiors — at the virginal, the lute, and the guitar. Often a metaphor for harmony or courtship, these scenes set instruments beside letters, wine, and watchful companions, and include the stolen Concert and the two virginal pictures now in London.

Harmony and courtship

Music runs through Vermeer’s interiors as a sign of harmony and, very often, of courtship. An instrument set between a man and a woman could speak of concord, of seduction, or of both at once, and the Dutch knew how to read it. The instruments themselves range widely, from the virginal and the lute to the guitar, the cittern, and the bass viol so often left lying on the floor, and Vermeer painted them precisely enough that instrument historians can still identify the types.

Music carried a larger idea as well. To Vermeer’s contemporaries it stood for harmony itself, even a reflection of divine order, and in a republic divided between Catholic and Protestant it was one of the few things that crossed the line: players of both confessions met and performed together in the civic music colleges. A scene at the virginal is rarely only about the lesson.

At the virginal

The keyboard pictures form a family of their own. The two paintings in London, A Lady Standing at a Virginal and A Lady Seated at a Virginal, were likely conceived as a contrasting pair, and the small Young Woman Seated at the Virginals is a more intimate variation on the theme. In The Music Lesson an inscription on the lid of the instrument reads MUSICA LAETITIAE COMES MEDICINA DOLORUM, music is the companion of joy and a medicine for sorrows.

The instruments are specific enough to place. As Jan Bouterse’s study sets out, the keyboards in these rooms are almost certainly products of the Ruckers workshop in Antwerp, whose name carried the fame that Stradivarius would later have for violins, identifiable by the block-printed paper, patterned with little seahorses, pasted around the keys. A true harpsichord appears in only one Vermeer, the stolen Concert; the rest are virginals of the muselaar type, their keyboard set to the right, and in picture after picture a viola da gamba lies waiting on the floor.

The missing concert

The motif also carries Vermeer’s most painful loss. The Concert, a trio at the keyboard, was cut from its frame in the 1990 theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and has never been recovered. It remains the most valuable stolen painting in the world, and an empty frame still hangs where it once did.