(Utrecht circa 1597–1674)
A young violinist in a red cap and cloak,
oil on canvas, 72 x 59.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection Vladimir Pavlovich Zuroff (1851–1914), Moscow (as Dirck van Baburen);
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; sale, Fischer, Lucerne, 18 August 1931 (as Dirck van Baburen);
Collection M. Streletzki, Stockholm;
Collection Axel Wenner-Gren (1881–1961), Stockholm;
Collection Helene Gerschmann, Stockholm (as Jan van Bijlert);
Private collection, Germany;
sale, Uppsala Auktionskammare, 30 November 2010, lot 39 (as Jan van Bijlert);
Private collection, Germany

Literature:
T. von Frimmel, Bilder von seltenen Meistern, in: Helbings Monatsberichte über Kunst und Kunsthandel, 1901, p. 136;
H. Voss, Vermeer van Delft und die Utrechter Schule, in: Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, 5, no. 1, 1912, pp. 79/80;
L. J. Slatkes, Dirck van Baburen, A Dutch Painter in Utrecht and Rome, Utrecht 1965, p. 159, no. E23 (as Jan van Bijlert?);
P. Huys Janssen, Jan van Bijlert, Catalogue Raisonné, Amsterdam 1998, p. 198, no. R23 (under rejected attributions);
W. Franits, The Paintings of Dirck van Baburen, Catalogue Raisonné, Amsterdam 2013, p. 228, no. R 135 (as ‘closer to Jan van Bijlert than it is to Van Baburen’)

When Paul Huys Janssen was working on his monograph on Jan van Bijlert, the present painting, which had disappeared from the market in 1931, was only known to him through a weak photograph, and he therefore rejected the attribution to Bijlert. When the painting re-appeared on the art market, Huys Janssen revised his earlier opinion and endorsed the present composition as an autograph work by Jan van Bijlert on the basis of a photograph. He dates the work to the early 1630s.

The painting belongs to a group of some thirty pictures of half-figure musicians and their instruments Bijlert executed between 1625 and 1635 (see P. Huys Janssen, Jan van Bijlert, op. cit., cat. nos. 101–133). It is closely related to a Young Violinist from circa 1625, which was with Richard Green in London in 1995. The two paintings correspond in terms of the position of the young sitters in profile to the left and in terms of their plumed caps, whereas they deviate from each other in the way in which they handle their instruments. Whereas the young musician in the present painting seems to be tuning it, the protagonist of the London painting is singing while playing on his violin.

As Paul Huys Janssen has pointed out, Bijlert’s group of half-figure musicians is characterised by the artist’s use of two or three dominant colours that distinctly stand out from a mostly dark background. Here it is the red of the cloak and the cap, which brings the work close to the classical style prevalent in Italy at the time, and in terms of the colours makes it comparable to the art of such Bolognese painters as Lavinia Fontana, Carlo Cignani, and Annibale Carracci. The present work thus exhibits a powerful fusion of international Caravaggism and contemporary classical tendencies.