Woman Playing a Guitar

Simon Vouet's Woman Playing a Guitar, painted around 1618, dates from the French master's Italian period when he was absorbing the influences of Caravaggio and the Bolognese painters in Rome. Vouet spent over a decade in Italy (1613-1627) before returning to Paris as the dominant painter at the French court. Musical subjects were popular among Caravaggist painters, and this work shows Vouet's engagement with the genre before he developed the elegant, classicizing style of his French period.

Vouet's oil-on-canvas technique in this Italian-period work shows Caravaggist influence in the strong directional lighting and warm palette. The musician's face and hands are carefully modeled with rich flesh tones, while the guitar and costume are rendered with the attention to material textures typical of Caravaggist genre painting.