Music as the Mediator of Love and Sexual Endeavours: Seventeenth-Century Depictions of Women in Domestic and Public Spaces

Written by Sophie Kraft

Edited by Rachel Barker

From “lusty brothel scenes” to “elegant men and women in refined surroundings,” art of the Dutch Republic portrays women in domestic and public spaces, using music to define their sexuality.¹ Specifically, musical instruments in paintings allude to the themes of love and sex.² The role of music differs in the private domestic interior versus in public life. In The Music Lesson (fig. 1) and Lady Seated at a Virginal (Fig. 2), two of Johannes Vermeer’s domestic genre paintings, the role of musical instruments and their relation to the elite domestic woman’s sexuality is conveyed through stolen glances and the hanging allegories on the wall. In contrast, in the public space, such as the brothel in Jacob Ochtervelt’s Musical Company in an Interior (Fig. 3) and Dirck van Baburen’s Procuress (Fig. 4), music and instruments explicitly portray overt sexual behaviour to the viewer. While both private and public spaces mediate the relationship between the figures and their peers, in the austere and pristine private home, music disrupts the quietness of the domestic woman without explicitly showing her sexual behaviour. Whereas, in the public sphere, and particularly the brothel, music conveys the sensory experience of these encounters in a lively, disruptive, and overtly sexual space.

Figure 1. Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson, c. 1662-1664, National Gallery, London.

Artists at this time used music making to refer to sexuality in the elite domestic interior, as the music lesson was a socially acceptable setting in which a man, entering the home as a music teacher, could be alone with a woman.³ Musical talent embodied both positive and negative values; on one hand, music was viewed as a “divine gift of the gods,” while simultaneously it was criticized for its “inherently sensual and sensory qualities.”⁴ Vermeer’s The Music Lesson depicts a sunlit room where an elegantly dressed man intently listens to a woman playing at her virginal.⁵ The painting depicts a young woman and her potential suitor, as understood by the “pictorial tradition” that a music lesson is a ruse for love.⁶ The foreground features a viola da gamba, inviting the viewer to join the woman in playing music to entertain the man.⁷ Although the painting depicts this as a music lesson, the viewer cannot see the woman's hands on the virginal actively playing.⁸ She appears to be fully engaged; however, the turn of her head as seen in the mirror’s reflection shows that she is more interested in how this music will bring her closer to her potential suitor.⁹ Vermeer emphasizes the actual music she is playing less than the impact of what music represents in this setting, which is “joy, harmony in love, healing and solace.”¹⁰ In the Dutch Republic, lyrics written for the virginal “extolled” love.¹¹ The virginal the woman plays on is inscribed with the words “music is the companion of joy, the medicine of sorrow.”¹² It credits music for joy and healing sorrow through its practice and the “tentative, strictly governed,” yet amorous exchange between the two figures as seen in a close-up view of their expressions (Figure 1a and 1b).¹³ This nuanced gaze connotates a possible romance between the two figures without making it explicit to the viewer.¹⁴ Vermeer uses music in his paintings to portray “the politically restrained, yet intensely felt, passions of his protagonists,” which the viewer feels in The Music Lesson through a quick stolen glance.¹⁵

Figure 1a. Detail of Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson.

Figure 1b. Detail of Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson.

Vermeer’s The Concert also features the act of music-making with subtle hints of sexual innuendos (Fig. 5). However, Vermeer “leaves the viewer uncertain about the actual intention” of the painting by including both a landscape painting and the Procuress painting on the wall.¹⁶ The women, one young and one old, are absorbed in their tasks, and accompanied by a male figure whose face cannot be seen. The older woman can be understood as the mediator of the courtship between the man and the young woman.¹⁷ This trio juxtaposes the painting that hangs on the wall of Dirck van Baburen’s Procuress. The older woman in The Concert stands below the Procuress, alluding to the parallel between her and the procuress as moderators of love, although the settings differ; this being an elite courtship rather than a sexual exchange that occurs in the prostitution ring.¹⁸ The Procuress conveys how, although one cannot hear the music they are producing, it is about love and sex.¹⁹ In contrast to the Procuress, the landscape painting hanging next to it suggests that the music being made here represents a moderated and controlled love rather than the sexual desire that is depicted in the Procuress. While the landscape represents serenity and embodies the virtuosity of the woman and her music who is positioned below, the Procuress’ composition is busy and explicitly sexual, which is inextricably linked to the loud music often associated with illicit love.

Figure 5. Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, c. 1663-1666.

Figure 4. Dirck van Baburen, Procuress, c. 1622, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In Vermeer’s Lady Seated at a Virginal, the refined domestic woman is dressed in elegant silks as she is seated at her virginal; however, her surroundings question her sexual purity. The curtain revealing this scene allows the viewer to enter this drama and understand what happens in the home behind closed doors. Hanging on the wall above her is Baburen’s Procuress, which depicts a prostitute playing the lute while demanding payment from the men surrounding her.²⁰ The “laughing trio” in the Procuress are too absorbed in their interaction to look at the woman or the viewer.²¹ Vermeer’s young woman’s calm and contained practice sharply contrast the Procuress painting, conflicting the ideals of “pure, honourable love between a man and a woman versus more mercenary forms of sexual relations.”²² Her virginity is depicted by the virginal she sits at, but her sexuality is defined by the painting on the wall.²³ Although no male teacher is featured in this painting, the combination of the instrument and the Procuress in the background suggest that her sexuality deviates from modest virginity. The cello in the foreground, together with the virginal, act as an allegory implying harmony between lovers, like the harmony of sound that would be produced should the viewer join in on her playing.²⁴

Figure 2. Johannes Vermeer, Lady Seated at a Virginal, c. 1670-1675, National Gallery, London.

In contrast, A Lady Standing at a Virginal (Fig. 6) embodies “proper, true love.”²⁵ Set in a bright room, the woman stands at the virginal, gazing directly back at the viewer. Behind her is a painting of Cupid holding up a card, which is based on an emblem that reads, “a lover ought to have only one.”²⁶ The paintings within the painting help the viewer understand the woman’s sexual purity and how she is dedicated to a monogamous relationship with, perhaps, her absent husband. The painting of Cupid hanging behind the woman in A Lady Standing at a Virginal contrasts depictions of musical instruments and their association with sex in the domestic interior by indicating pure and faithful love.

Figure 6. Johannes Vermeer, Lady Standing at a Virginal c. 1670-1675, National Gallery, London.

Where the elite domestic interiors portray music as an allegory of sexuality and love within the regulated home, in public genre scenes, music explicitly alludes to sexual behaviour. In the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, men were able to find prostitutes in the “speelhuizen,” the music hall.²⁷ Amsterdam was famous for its dancing and live music, attracting elite men and lower-class sex workers.²⁸ The music hall was a prime tourist attraction for immorality and served as the meeting place for men to meet and follow prostitutes to the brothel.²⁹ In Ochtervelt’s Musical Company in an Interior, the figures are engaged in each other's company in what first appears to be an “elegant gathering,” but upon inspection, it is a brothel.³⁰ The woman is the prominent figure in this painting, dressed in a bright red silk and golden dress, bathed in light, while playing her violin. These instruments were associated with “dance halls, brothels and other dubious establishments” during the seventeenth century.³¹ The painting forces the question: is she an elite woman or a high-class sex worker?³² The wall in the background provides an answer; where portraits of different women are lined up to help the men choose the partners they wish to have sexual encounters with.³³ This positions the woman as one of the prostitutes putting on a show for potential clients.³⁴ She is surrounded by men dressed in rich garb, who are engaged in her beauty more so than their musical abilities. The man in the foreground wears a sash that is meant to hold a sword, indicating that he is a soldier. This confirms the setting as a brothel, as it was also common for artists to portray soldiers “as habituès of brothels.”³⁵ Music’s role in the public space of the brothel is to mediate and liaise between the men, the prostitutes, and their sexual endeavours.

Figure 3. Jacob Ochtervelt, Musical Company in an Interior, c. 1670, Museum of Art, Cleveland.

Baburen’s Procuress alludes to themes of prostitution, the exchange of money for sex, and music-making as a seductive activity.³⁶ It is used in several seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings to suggest sexual behaviour within the space it inhabits. In the Procuress, the young prostitute plays music for a man, the composition actively drawing attention to her exposed breasts, illuminated by the light pouring in from the left side of the frame.³⁷ The painting emphasizes the idea of mercenary love, primarily concerned with money over morality.³⁸ Depicted as a “lute-playing whore,” the prostitute seduces the man with her musical abilities and body, so he presents her with a coin.³⁹ The procuress, depicted on the right, runs the prostitution ring and inspects the coin while asking for more money for the prostitute's work.⁴⁰ She capitalizes off of the prostitute's musical talent and sexual nature, which “[robs prostitutes] of their purses,” and hands them off “to male accomplices.”⁴¹ The exchange of money between the figures for prostitution is mediated by the musical instrument the young woman plays.⁴² In this scene, musical abilities are associated with frivolity and a lower moral status.

In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, musical instruments were frequent channels of both sexual innuendos and explicit sexual behaviour in artwork.⁴³ The genre paintings that depict scenes of private interior and public spaces become “visual statements of the attitudes, moods and ideas” of the perspective towards women's sexuality at this time.⁴⁴ In the public interior, whether the brothel or the prostitution ring, music combines with the active solicitation of women in a place of entertainment and musical liveliness. Figures’ animated expressions evince the spirited and lively nature of these paintings as individuals engage with music and each other. However, in private homes, the compositions are quieter, while music peacefully and harmoniously interjects, but does not betray the austere and civil environment. Music mediates the relationship between the figures and their peers, or the space they occupy in public and private spaces. Whether this is explicitly shown through body language, and location, or surreptitiously through paintings within paintings, allegories, or a quick stolen glance, depictions of music playing in both upper and lower-class societies convey the attitudes towards women’s sexuality in the Dutch Republic.

Endnotes

1.  Marjorie Wieseman, Vermeer and Music: the Art of Love and Leisure, (London: National Gallery, 2013), 9.

2. Arthur Wheelock and Johannes Vermeer, Jan Vermeer (New York: Abrams, 1981), 40.

3. Arthur Wheelock, Vermeer & The Art of Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 86.

4. Wieseman,“Love and Leisure,” 25.

5. Wheelock and Vermeer, Jan Vermeer, 100.

6. Marjorie Wieseman, “Inside Vermeer's Women,” In Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 93.

7. Marjorie Wieseman, Vermeer and Music the Art of Love and Leisure, (National Gallery, 2013), 62.

8. Wheelock, Vermeer & The Art of Painting, 88.

9. Wieseman, “Inside Vermeer's Women,” 95.

10. Wheelock, Vermeer & The Art of Painting 88.

11. Wheelock, “The Art of Painting,” 85.

12. Wieseman, “Love and Leisure,” 62.

13. Wieseman, “Love and Leisure,” 62.

14. Wheelock and Johannes Vermeer, Jan Vermeer, 9.

15. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music , 40.

16. Maria Kramer, “A Study of the Paintings of Vermeer of Delft,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1970): 411, https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1970.11926535.

17. Wieseman, “Inside Vermeer's Women,” , 97.

18. Kramer, “A Study of the Paintings of Vermeer of Delft,” 411.

19. Wheelock, Vermeer & The Art of Painting, 116.

20. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music, 66.

21. Linda P. Austern, “For, Love's A Good Musician’: Performance, Audition, and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 3-4 (1998): 639, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/82.3-4.614.

22. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music, 66.

23. Kramer, “A Study of the Paintings of Vermeer of Delft,” 400.

24. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music, 28.

25. Wieseman, “Inside Vermeer's Women,” 102.

26. Wieseman, “Inside Vermeer's Women,” 102.

27. Lotte van de Pol, “The Whore, the BAWD, and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2 (2010), 4, https://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2010.2.1.3.

28. van de Pol, “The Whore,” 4.

29. van de Pol, “The Whore,” 4.

30. Helmer Helmers, Geert Janssen and Wayne Franits “Genre Painting,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 277.

31. Wayne E. Franits, , “‘For People of Fashion’: Domestic Imagery and the Art Market in the Dutch Republic,” In Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, no. 51 (2000): 301.

32. Angela Vanhaelen, “Domesticity: Gender, Sex Work, and Patriarchy” (Lecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, 2022).

33. Franits, “For People,” 301.

34. Franits, “For People,” 301.

35. Helmers, Janssen and Franits “Genre Painting,” 277.

36. Vanhaelen, “Domesticity: Gender, Sex Work, and Patriarchy.”

37. Vanhaelen, “Domesticity: Gender, Sex Work, and Patriarchy.”

38. Wayne Franits, “Utrecht,” 68.

39. Wayne Franits, “Utrecht,” 68

40. Wayne Franits, “Utrecht,” 68

41. van de Pol, “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution,” 9.

42. Vanhaelen, “Domesticity: Gender, Sex Work, and Patriarchy.”

43. Vanhaelen, “Domesticity: Gender, Sex Work, and Patriarchy.”

44. Wheelock and Vermeer, Jan Vermeer, 10.

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