The Music Lesson

Painted in the early 1660s, The Music Lesson shows a young woman at a virginal with her back largely turned to us, and a gentleman standing beside her who may be her teacher, her suitor, or both. His slightly parted lips suggest he is singing along as she plays, a detail that gives the scene its undertone of courtship. Music in Vermeer’s interiors is rarely only about music, and the association of harmony with love runs through the picture.

Music as the companion of joy

The lid of the virginal carries the Latin motto “MVSICA LETITIAE CO[ME]S MEDICINA DOLOR[VM]”, “Music is the companion of joy, balm for sorrow.” The instrument itself is a Ruckers virginal, roughly sixty years old when Vermeer painted it, its case faced with block-printed papers. A viola da gamba lies on the floor in the foreground, apparently added at a later stage of work, hinting at a duet and so at a second, unseen presence in the room.

The mirror and the painter

Above the virginal hangs an ebony-framed mirror that reflects the young woman’s face, the tiled floor, the edge of the carpet, and the crossbar and a leg of Vermeer’s easel. The reflection shows the floor at a different angle from the one we see directly, and by including the easel it quietly places the painter inside his own composition. The receding marble tiles and the Turkish carpet draped over the table are studies in measured perspective, organized so precisely that the orthogonals converge on the standing man.

Perspective and the camera obscura

Technical examination has shown that Vermeer set a pin at the vanishing point and snapped a chalked string to lay down his orthogonal lines, a workmanlike method behind the picture’s geometric calm. Whether he also used a camera obscura to achieve such optical precision has been argued for over a century and remains unsettled. The painting was the subject of the 2013 documentary Tim’s Vermeer, in which the inventor Tim Jenison reconstructed it with a mirror-and-lens device to test the optical theory, a demonstration that drew both interest and sharp skepticism from critics.

From the Dissius sale to Windsor

The picture most likely belonged to Vermeer’s Delft patron Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and passed through his heirs to the 1696 Dissius sale in Amsterdam, appearing as lot 6. It then went to the Venetian painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and later to Consul Joseph Smith, whose collection King George III bought in 1762, bringing the painting into the Royal Collection as a work by Frans van Mieris. It was recognized as a Vermeer only in 1866, when Théophile Thoré identified the artist, the same critic who did much to rebuild Vermeer’s reputation across his work.