Femme au virginal

A young woman sits in profile at a virginal, her hands resting on the keys, dressed in a grey gown with three-quarter sleeves tied with pale pink ribbons, a white apron and a small cap over her gathered hair; absorbed in her music, she seems lost in a quiet reverie, while behind her, beside a closed door, a small landscape hangs on the wall. Gabriel Metsu, the Leiden-born master of the intimate interior, painted this small panel in the early 1660s, at the height of his Amsterdam years, when he set single figures in rooms suffused with a soft, still light. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.