The Music Lesson (c. 1670): Artwork and History

The Music Lesson (c. 1670) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Gerard ter Borch the Younger (Dutch, 1617-1681).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

In this small-scale scene of everyday life, a woman plays the double-headed lute as her companion marks the tempo. He is presumably her music instructor, but the similarity in their ages and the presence of the bed in the background make the precise relationship of the figures tantalizingly ambiguous. Gerard ter Borch the Younger painted many images like this one, featuring military officers and elegant young women in shimmering satin conversing, making music, or exchanging letters.

Object facts

• Title: The Music Lesson
• Date: c. 1670
• Artist attribution: Gerard ter Borch the Younger (Dutch, 1617-1681)
• Place of origin: Netherlands
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 63.6 × 50.4 cm (25 × 19 7/8 in.); Framed: 84.8 × 70.8 × 6.4 cm (33 3/8 × 27 7/8 × 2 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1891.1

Collection credit

Gift of Charles T. Yerkes

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.