A Concert

A Concert, painted around 1675, belongs to the final phase of Gerard ter Borch's career and to a subject he had explored since mid-century: the domestic music-making of the prosperous Dutch household. By the 1670s ter Borch's concert scenes had achieved a refined economy of composition, distilling the social pleasures of ensemble playing into a small number of elegantly arranged figures whose costumes and instruments declare their cultural attainment. Music was one of the primary markers of upper-class refinement in seventeenth-century Dutch society, and paintings of domestic concerts served their owners as visual statements of cultivated domesticity. This work is held at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, part of the Scandinavian collecting of Dutch Golden Age art that began in earnest in the eighteenth century and produced significant holdings across the Nordic museum system.

Oil on canvas, this late work exhibits the tonal economy of ter Borch's mature style: a warm, low-contrast palette in which figures emerge from a softly lit interior space. Instruments and sheet music are rendered with summary but informed attention to their actual forms, while the figures' clothing — though still precisely observed — is handled with slightly looser brushwork than in his mid-career portraits.