A Musical Party

The theme of musical companies was one of the favourite subjects of van Kuijl’s teacher Gerrit van Honthorst and his followers, notably among the circle of Caravaggesque painters based in Utrecht, who had seen this aspect of Caravaggio’s style in Rome and imported it to the northern Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth century. This seems to be the largest and grandest of Van Kuijl’s several treatments of the subject. The earliest is the Musical Company of 1651 in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in which some motifs such as the viol-da-gamba player anchoring one side of the composition and the young boy at the table are common to this painting too.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Arcangelo Corelli: Allemanda from Trio sonata