Garden - party playing music

Ambrosius Benson's Garden Party Playing Music presents a secular leisure subject unusual for this Bruges master known primarily for devotional works. The outdoor music-making scene, showing elegantly dressed figures in a garden setting, participates in a tradition of courtly pastimes imagery that reflected aristocratic and upper bourgeois ideals of refined recreation. Benson's Italian origins and his Flemish training combine in this work to produce a scene of outdoor pleasure with the precise surface rendering of Flemish technique applied to a subject derived from Italian festival imagery and French court poetry.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.