A Musician and His Daughter

Thomas de Keyser was Amsterdam’s leading portraitist before Rembrandt and Bartholomeus van der Helst, the painter whose intimate, carefully staged portraits defined the city’s taste in the 1620s and 1630s. A Musician and His Daughter dates from 1629, when de Keyser was at the height of his fame and Rembrandt, newly arrived in Amsterdam, was still learning from his example. The double portrait of a father and daughter making music belongs to the genre of family portraiture that de Keyser pioneered, and it shows the easy naturalism that later generations of Dutch portraitists took for granted.