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Musical Scene
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
The Utrecht artist Gerrit van Honthorst was internationally known as a portrait painter, but he also gained a reputation as a painter of raucous musical scenes and parties. This drawing was once part of an album of compositional types that the artist showed to prospective patrons. Though the cheerful theme of a man and a woman sharing a song seems innocent, such unions often had amorous or lascivious connotations in 17th-century Holland.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s own descriptionCredit lineMusical Scene, 1625–55. Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1590–1656). Black ink wash over pen and brown ink and black chalk over graphite on gray-brown paper with white heightening, incised; support: 23.3 x 26.8 x 0.3 cm (9 3/16 x 10 9/16 x 1/8 in.); image: 17.3 x 20.2 cm (6 13/16 x 7 15/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, 2019.6
