Luit spelende vrouw 1751 - 1816

Editor: We're looking at "Luit spelende vrouw," or "Woman playing the Lute," an engraving by Reinier Vinkeles, sometime between 1751 and 1816. The monochrome and delicate detail gives it such a formal feel, almost like a captured, fleeting moment in a play. What strikes you when you look at it? Curator: Oh, it whisks me away! I feel a delightful sense of peeking into someone's private little opera. She’s got that Baroque drama, doesn't she? Note the stage-like presentation, how the whole scene is framed in stone, a classic picture frame that gives depth, yet is so very still! A moment of serenity frozen in time...almost. What’s the fellow in the background doing? Editor: He seems to be gesturing, maybe delivering a line, a character caught mid-motion! It's interesting how she's centered and seems lost in her world of music, yet he’s equally present within the same tableau. Curator: Exactly! It's not just a pretty lady with a lute. Vinkeles has orchestrated a subtle drama. Perhaps she’s awaiting his reaction, providing the soundscape to his intended story. This print manages to freeze music and anticipation into a single shared moment of expression and artifice. It even looks as though she has stepped right out of a gilded theatre box into an artist’s waiting canvas! Don’t you feel it too? Editor: Absolutely! It’s much more than just an image; it’s a fragment of a story! It makes you imagine everything that might happen next! Thanks for shining a new light on this engraving. Curator: My pleasure! Now I wonder what tune she's playing, or if that fellow has come to praise her art... or deliver some unfortunate news! Until the next image teases our curiosity.