the salutation

The Salutation, painted in 1642, is among ter Borch's earliest surviving mature works, created when the artist was around twenty-four years old and still developing the refined interior genre style he would perfect over the following three decades. The subject — a formal greeting or salutation between figures — belongs to the tradition of courtly and semi-courtly scenes of social encounter that ter Borch had absorbed during his travels in Flanders and England. At this stage of his career ter Borch had not yet settled into the domestic interior milieu he would make his own; his early works show a broader range of subject matter and a more overtly dramatic sense of staging. This painting was part of the collection of the Führermuseum in Linz, the planned but never-completed Nazi state museum for which thousands of artworks were looted or purchased under duress during the Second World War, and it subsequently passed through Allied repatriation processes.

Painted in oil on canvas in the early 1640s, this work shows ter Borch working with a somewhat more vigorous and less refined brushstroke than his later productions. The figures are confidently placed in a shallow interior space, with light used to model clothing and faces in a manner still indebted to Flemish Baroque precedents. Palette and spatial construction are both richer and less austere than his mature interiors.