The musicians

Le Nain, Mathieu (1607-1677) (attributed to)

Item type:

painting

Date of creation:

1650

Height:

32.4 cm  (12 3/4 in.)

Width:

40.2 cm  (15 13/16 in.)

Technique / Medium:

oil on canvas

Description

A man plays the guitar while an older man sits in the background to his left gazing at the viewer. On the guitarist's right, an older man plays a wind instrument (probably a type of shawm). From the museum website: The three Le Nain brothers — Antoine, Louis and Mathieu — worked in collaboration and did not sign their work individually, making it difficult to attribute their paintings definitively to a single hand. This concert scene, however, has been accepted by the art historian Pierre Rosenberg as being by Mathieu. After many years in store, this painting has finally returned to the Gallery thanks to recent conservation. Brilliantly painted passages have emerged, such as the still life on the table, along with the figure of the boy to the right, theatrically dressed in slashed sleeves, who had previously been damaged by overcleaning. Interestingly, the same figure appears in an unfinished group portrait at the National Gallery, London. A larger version omitting this figure is in a French private collection.

Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)

Guitar [3237]
Treble shawm [4287]

RIdIM images

Image URLs

image link 1
image link 2

Bibliographic references

Dickerson, C. D. and Esther Bell. The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of seventeenth-century France (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) 212-213, cat. no. 28. ISBN 9780300218886.

RIdIM record id

5139

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