A Boy Playing the Lute

Music and laughter carry a warning in this small panel, one of a series of the Five Senses painted in the 1620s; its companion, A Girl Holding a Glass, also belongs to the Nationalmuseum. In the seventeenth-century understanding that the museum sets out in its own account of the pair, laughter was taken as a sign of the unreason of the lower orders, who were thought to be at the mercy of the flesh — so that such pictures cautioned against indulgence at the same time as they entertained. Hendrick Terbrugghen was the most personal of the Dutch followers of Caravaggio, one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti who had seen the Italian master’s work in Rome before returning to the north, and he was counted with Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen among the painters who brought the movement home to the Netherlands. His death in 1629, at about forty, cut short a career whose modern reputation had to wait for the twentieth century. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.