The Music Lesson
Artwork by Rembrandt • 1626
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About this artwork - painting analysis
Painted in 1626, Rembrandt's Concert is one of the most singular works from the Dutch master's early period. At only twenty years old, the artist boldly explored a genre then fashionable in the United Provinces: the intimate concert scene, which blended aristocratic refinement with oriental exoticism. The painting presents four figures richly dressed in orientalizing costumes, crowned with sumptuous turbans adorned with feathers. At the center of the composition, a young woman with translucent complexion, adorned with a dress of golden and orange hues, carefully reads a musical score placed on a lectern. Around her, three musicians – one playing the viol da gamba and another holding a harp – create an atmosphere of melodious concentration, while in the foreground, scattered books and instruments testify to a refined artistic practice.
Rembrandt's interest in chiaroscuro already asserts itself in this precocious composition, although with less mastery than in his mature works. Light, emanating from an invisible source located to the right, sculpts the faces and makes precious fabrics shimmer in a chromatic range dominated by golds, ochres, and deep greens. The influence of his master Pieter Lastman is evident in this taste for theatrical costumes and orientalizing atmosphere, reflecting a typically Dutch fascination with the exotic during the golden age of maritime trade. In the background, a painting within the painting depicting a biblical scene adds a metapictorial dimension characteristic of Northern Baroque.
Held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, this canvas bears witness to Rembrandt's early stylistic investigations, before his definitive settlement in Amsterdam in 1631. It illustrates the precocious technical virtuosity of an artist who would revolutionize European painting, while documenting seventeenth-century Dutch society's interest in music as a marker of social and cultural distinction.
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Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
