The Concert

Johannes Vermeer

Oil on canvas

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Concert (c. 1664) is an oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age master Johannes Vermeer, depicting three figures absorbed in domestic music-making within a sunlit interior. A woman is seated at a harpsichord whose upturned lid reveals a painted Arcadian landscape, a second woman stands holding sheet music with one hand raised to beat time, and a man sits with his back to the viewer. Two paintings hang on the back wall: a wild pastoral landscape on the left, and on the right Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress (c. 1622), a work owned by Vermeer's mother-in-law, whose presence has generated enduring scholarly debate about whether the scene alludes to love and seduction or deliberately contrasts with it. Vermeer's characteristic mastery of diffused natural light animates the pearl jewelry, the silk garments, and the Persian carpet on the table, investing the intimate scene with his hallmark atmosphere of hushed, concentrated stillness.