A lady playing a guitar on a balcony

The oeuvre of Johannes van Bronchorst was all but forgotten by the 18th century, and until the 1980s works were wrongly attributed to his father, Jan Gerritsz. van Bronchorst. Johannes van Bronchorst's Saint Bartholomew of 1652 (Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna) is the earliest attributed work. Johannes can be seen as a link between the first generation of the Utrecht caravaggisti, which involved, among others, his father and also his teacher, Gerrit van Honthorst, and the following generation of Dutch Classicists, such as Gérard de Lairesse. The influence of these artists can be seen in the present picture, where van Bronchorst has depicted a life-size representation of a lute player, with a heightened contrast between light and dark.

We are grateful to Professor Albert Blankert and Mr Peter van den Brink for suggesting that this picture can be attributed to Johannes van Bronchorst. We are also grateful to Paul Huys Janssen for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.