The Music Lesson, c.1668 by Gerard ter Borch
Canvas Print - 14612-GTB

The man's right hand hangs in the air above the table, palm down, fingers slightly spread. He is counting, or marking the beat, and the young woman beside him bends over her lute with her eyes lowered to the strings, too absorbed to look up. Neither of them speaks. The whole scene seems to rest in the pause between one measure and the next.

Gerard ter Borch built his reputation on moments like this one, small domestic encounters where very little happens and yet a good deal is felt. In The Music Lesson, whether the man is really her teacher is left open. He stands close behind her in a broad black hat and long dark curls, the white lace at his throat catching the light, and he looks down at her rather than at the open music book propped on its stand. She gives nothing away. The tension lives in that small gap between them.

Then there is the cloth. Ter Borch loved fabric, and the woman's clothes are the brightest thing in the room: a jacket of deep raspberry velvet edged with thick white fur, and a skirt of pale satin that spills toward the floor in folds of silver and cream, each crease turning from cool gray to almost white where the light strikes it. Beside it, the blue-green tablecloth has a heavier, duller sheen. The same attention goes to the spaniel curled asleep on the chair, its coat soft and wavy, and to the warm orange wood of the cello lying on its side, its grain different again from the floorboards and the chair legs. Look at the floor and you can find the nail heads; on the half-open door at the left, a small brass handle glints.

These objects carried meanings a Dutch viewer of the 1660s would have read without effort. The little wooden box in the lower left corner is a foot warmer, a familiar emblem of love, and the dark four-poster bed rising out of the shadows at the back suggests that this lesson might be heading somewhere else entirely - perhaps toward seduction. The poet Jacob Cats, widely read in the Netherlands at the time, held that love flourishes wherever music and good company are found, and the picture plays out his idea almost scene for scene.

Ter Borch came back to the subject of a woman with a lute around eleven times, reusing the satin gown, the fur-trimmed jacket, the dog, the bed and the door left ajar. This version, now at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, keeps its pleasures quiet. The walls are a soft gray, the corners sink into brown shadow, and real color gathers only around the young woman: the red of her sleeves, the pale blue ribbons tied in her blond hair. Everything waits on that raised hand. When it comes down, the next note will sound.