Oil on canvas

39 x 31 cm.

Framed 55 x 45 cm.

With expertise by Prof. Ferdinando Arisi

Outside a patrician palace, a woman is portrayed seated while delighting in playing a baroque guitar. Her depiction, bare-breasted, with a stool and a table richly carved with putti figures beside her, on which a score and a lute are resting, could be elements that give the painting symbolic value, particularly as an allegory of music.

The beautiful composition, which we can date to around 1670/80, is the work of Gaspard Netscher (Heidelberg, 1639 - The Hague, 1684), one of the leading artists of the Flemish Golden Age, known above all as a portrait painter of many illustrious personalities of his time, including William of Orange and Mary II of England and Madame de Montespan.

His production mostly consists of small but elegant portraits in which the influence of French painting can be perceived and often set outdoors, in elegant gardens illuminated by evening light, and enriched by elaborate sculptural works. In our case, this propensity is detected in the typically Baroque richness of the two furnishings, rendered with such precision that they can be defined as a still life in the painting.

By way of comparison, we list below some works by the painter, similar in iconographic and stylistic choices to ours:

- Lute Player, Piazzale degli Uffizi, Florence

- Portrait of Adriana Sophia van Raesfelt, Private Collection

- Portrait of a Lady (Anne Stuart ?), Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington

- Portrait of a Lady in a Garden, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Netscher's works can be found in various collections around the world, in museums such as the Uffizi Gallery, the Galleria Colonna in Rome, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in Paris, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Excellent conservation condition.