Lot 17: MICHIEL VAN MUSSCHER ROTTERDAM 1645 - 1705 AMSTERDAM

AN INTERIOR WITH A YOUNG GIRL, SEATED AT A TABLE COVERED WITH AN INDIAN CARPET AND READING A LETTER, ATTENDED BY A NEGRO PAGE

measurements note
19 3/4 by 15 1/2 in.; 50 by 39.5cm.

signed and dated on table leg lower right M.v.Musscher.Pinxit./A.º 1670.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

With Galerie van Diemen & Co., Berlin, 1921, no. 326 (according to a label on the reverse);
With C. Brunner, Paris, 1921 (as by Ter Borch);
Private Collection, Israel;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, December 16, 1999, lot 49, for £260,000.

LITERATURE

S.J. Gudlaugsson, Katalog der Gemälde Gerard Ter Borch, The Hague 1960, p. 176, no. 170c, reproduced plate XVIII, fig. 1;
O. Ydema, Carpets and their Datings in Netherlandish Paintings, Leiden/ Zutphen 1991, p. 178, no. 699.

NOTE

Michiel van Musscher's genre paintings depicting richly furnished bourgeois interiors found a ready market in wealthy Amsterdam, where he was living in the 1670s. The gilt-framed painting, table carpet, silver desk set and lavishly liveried negro page all testify to the mercantile wealth which had poured into the Netherlands by the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The young woman has set aside her ladylike task of sewing and is absorbed in a letter, presumably a love letter. The page awaits her reply with resigned, rather quizzical, patience. The theme of the love letter, with its frisson of mystery, was very popular in Dutch genre painting.

The pose of the woman, the table and the basket in the foreground are very similar to Gerard Ter Borch's A lady reading a letter in the Wallace Collection, London, which Gudlaugsson (See Literature, vol. II, p.173, no.168) dates circa 1662 (see J. Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures: Vol. IV Dutch and Flemish, 1992, p.40-41, cat. P236, illus.). Ter Borch's painting, however, is a composition of rather cool colors. In this work van Musscher makes splendid play of rich coral reds, from the young woman's dress and fashionable shoes to the table carpet and the page's red-trimmed livery.