A Musical Company (c. 1668): Art, History and Details

A Musical Company (c. 1668) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacob Ochtervelt (Dutch, 1634–1682).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Despite the calm demeanor and elegant disposition of the figures, this interior scene probably represents the interior of a brothel, signaled by the row of female portraits in the background, rarely found in other paintings of this period. The depiction of music provides another clue to the subject. The recorder and violin, played without scores, were perceived as cruder instrumentation and associated with prostitution, versus the elegant and complicated musicmaking seen in the work by Pieter de Hooch in the museum's collection.

Object facts

• Title: A Musical Company
• Date: c. 1668
• Creator attribution: Jacob Ochtervelt (Dutch, 1634–1682)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 73 x 64.5 x 5.5 cm (28 3/4 x 25 3/8 x 2 3/16 in.); Unframed: 58.5 x 48.9 cm (23 1/16 x 19 1/4 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Dutch
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1991.23

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Otto Naumann, Ltd., invoice, March 29, 1991, in CMA curatorial file.
• Otto Naumann, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, May 28, 2013, in CMA curatorial file.
• Roman Herzig, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Sept. 9, 2014, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.