lady playing guitar

Dated 1660 and once in the Führermuseum collection, this panel of a lady playing guitar belongs to the musical genre series that Van Mieris maintained throughout his career. The guitar — as distinct from the lute with which it is sometimes confused — was fashionable in the mid-seventeenth century Netherlands, its flat-backed body and brighter, more direct sound making it a different social marker from the more learned lute. A female figure at the guitar in a domestic interior was a subject treated with variations by virtually every major Dutch genre painter of the period — Vermeer, Ter Borch, Metsu — and Van Mieris's contribution is distinguished primarily by the microscopic surface quality of his fijnschilder execution. The Führermuseum provenance complicates the work's history, as with other Van Mieris panels in that group.

Panel with warm interior light falling across the guitar's curved body and the player's hands. The guitar's varnished spruce front and rosewood or ebony fingerboard are differentiated by colour and surface treatment. The strings — gut at this period — are painted as pale warm filaments across the instrument's face, their slight sag under tension accurately observed.