Lot 20 Dα

Eglon van der Neer created several depictions of elegant young ladies, most of whom pursue an everyday activity in a distinguished interior of the haute bourgeoisie. One of the artist's preferred motifs, taken up time and again throughout his career, is the lute player. In our painting, executed with fine painterly precision, a lady playing music is seated almost directly facing the viewer with her legs pointing slightly to the left and her upper body turned slightly to the right. She plucks at the lute with graceful movements and grasps the frets on the bridge of the instrument, while her slightly open mouth suggests that the musician is accompanying her with the lute while singing. The likely corresponding sheets of music can be seen on a table covered with a red velvet cloth on the right edge of the picture. The light coming from the left models the figure of the young lady so the shadow of the neck of the instrument falls on her left forearm. The light also generates the virtuoso shimmer of the precious, apricot-coloured silk on the lute player's skirt. Eglon van der Neer competed with Gerard ter Borch in the effective depiction of the material texture of silk and other luxurious fabrics. The young woman also wears a white linen blouse with widely billowing sleeves, which has begun to slip in a suggestively lascivious manner from her shoulder. Besides the bright white of the blouse and the light complexion, the colouring of our painting is defined by a delicate colour palette composed of the apricot of the skirt, the deep red of the velvet tablecloth and the warm brown of the lute body.
Eddy Schavemaker has dated our painting to the first half of the 1680s when Eglon van der Neer lived in Brussels. The artist was born in Amsterdam, the son of the landscape painter Aert van der Neer. After his training, he first worked from 1654 to 1659 in Southern French Orange, then alternately in Rotterdam and Amsterdam before moving to Brussels in 1679 where he lived until 1695. In 1687 van der Neer was appointed court painter to the Spanish King Charles II and eleven years later he held the same role to the Palatine Elector, in whose residence in Düsseldorf he died in 1703. In addition to elegant genre representations such as the present painting, van der Neer executed portrait commissions and also created several religious and mythological paintings as well as an increasing number of landscape views in his later years. Together with Adriaen van der Werff, his most important student, and Godefridus Schalcken, Eglon van der Neer is classed as one of the most accomplished artists of the later Leiden Fijnschilder school.