The Viola Player

This viola player from around 1644 belongs to the musical subjects that featured prominently in Dou's genre repertoire. Music-making in domestic interiors was understood in seventeenth-century Dutch culture as evidence of cultivation, leisure, and social accomplishment — the ability to play an instrument marking a person of means and education. The viola's particular qualities — its rounded wooden body, the taut strings, the bow poised in the player's hand — provided specific still life challenges within the figure composition that Dou's fijnschilder technique was ideally suited to render. Musical subjects combining figure and instrument were among his most consistently popular works with collectors both in Leiden and across Europe.

The instrument and the musician's hands are rendered with the meticulous precision for which Dou was famous, the polished wood of the viola reflecting light with the same fidelity as the player's silk garments.