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Musical Scene
Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1590–1656)
1625–55
- Medium
- black ink wash over pen and brown ink and black chalk over graphite on gray-brown paper with white heightening, incised
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Support: 23.3 x 26.8 x 0.3 cm (9 3/16 x 10 9/16 x 1/8 in.); Image: 17.3 x 20.2 cm (6 13/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The Utrecht artist Gerrit van Honthorst was internationally known as a portrait painter, but he also gained a reputation as a painter of raucous musical scenes and parties. This drawing was once part of an album of compositional types that the artist showed to prospective patrons. Though the cheerful theme of a man and a woman sharing a song seems innocent, such unions often had amorous or lascivious connotations in 17th-century Holland.
