Two Men and a Young Woman making Music on a Terrace

Two Men and a Young Woman Making Music on a Terrace from 1670, now in the National Gallery, depicts an outdoor musical gathering that combines courtship with artistic entertainment in a manner typical of Steen's later work. Music-making was a common subject in Dutch genre painting, but Steen's treatment is characteristically theatrical: his musical scenes feel staged, with the participants performing for each other and for the viewer simultaneously. Dutch musical iconography encoded erotic and social meanings that would have been immediately legible to 17th-century audiences: the ability to perform music signified education and refinement, while musical duets and trios implied amorous intimacy. Steen's music-making scenes belong to a tradition that includes Vermeer's music paintings, but where Vermeer creates scenes of still, interior intensity, Steen tends toward the animated social performance of an outdoor terrace. The 1670 date places this in his mature period, when his style — warmer and more refined than his early work — was fully developed. His own family members often modeled for his figures, giving his scenes a particularity of observation that distinguishes them from more generic treatments of the same subjects.

The outdoor musical scene demonstrates Steen's late handling, with warm light and refined detail in the musical instruments and figures's interactions.