Pieter Jansz QUAST (Artist): Elegant lady playing lute - original 1641 Drawing

Description

[Music Iconography, Lute] Quast, Pieter Jansz. (1606 - 1647)
Elegant lady playing the lute - ORIGINAL 1641 DRAWING
Original drawing on vellum, lead point, 20.9 x 18.2 cm., signed lower right "Pieter Quast 1641." A few small stains and wrinkles, overall in fine condition.
The Dutch Golden Age painter and draughtsman Pieter Jansz Quast, produced an important body of mostly small social genre paintings, as well as finished drawings, often on parchment/vellum like the present assuredly drawn one, monogrammed and dated, and undoubtedly intended to be sold. His work is sometimes compared to that of Adriaen van de Venne and Adriaen Brouwer, as well as of Adriaen van Ostade, to whom some of his best work has previously been ascribed. Quast was probably born and certainly died in Amsterdam, but from 1634 to 1641 he lived at The Hague, where he was admitted to the local Guild of Saint Luke in 1634. Although he was drawing master to the young Prince William II of Orange (1626-1650), Quast failed to flourish in The Hague, which was an expensive place to live. His debts to a shopkeeper in 1640, to an innkeeper in 1641, and to a carpenter in 1642 were the subjects of court cases. He fared no better in Amsterdam, and financial problems continued, with rent not being paid by the Quasts in 1644. He died in poverty, like many artists of the period, and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in 1647; his widow re-married the painter Jacob van Spreeuwen from Leiden. See: B.A. Stanton-Hirst, ‘Pieter Quast and the Theatre’, Oud Holland 96 (1982), p. 213-37; Walter A. Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/New Haven/London 2007, vol. I, pp. 539-40.
Light and portable, a harmonizing instrument far cheaper and easier to maintain than keyboards, the lute was (and is) enormously versatile. Examination of Dutch genre works in particular show that a number of painters clearly kept it as a studio prop and, naturally, a few (certainly Jan Steen) must have actually played it. In the present drawing, the exact number of strings cannot be counted, but it appears to be an 11 course instrument, which would be the expected type for the date.
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