A. H. Payne after Caspar Netscher. Die Sängerin. A Lady Singing.

Caspar Netscher (1639-1684) was a native of Heidelberg whose family was driven from Germany by the religious war with the Swedes. As a young artist, he found refuge in Holland as a student of Gerard ter Borch in Deventer before settling in the Hague (Gower 78-79). Like Metsu and van Mieris, Netscher was strongly influenced by Gerard Dou. Robinson shows in his monograph on Metsu how Netscher’s paintings of the 1660s assimilated not only the Leiden school of Dou, van Mieris, and Metsu but the Delft school of De Hooch, Metsu, and Vermeer. Many of Netscher’s most distinctive works of the 1660s feature “conversation pieces” among elegant young men and women, often over a table or in a window niche covered with a sumptuous Turkish carpet or tapestry (Robinson 92-93). Such is the case with the one print after Netscher in Melville’s collection, A. H. Payne’s engraving of Der Sängerin (A Lady Singing) from Payne’s Royal Dresden Gallery (1845), after the painting in that Gallery (fig. 1). 

Netscher’s Singing Lady relates most obviously to the work of Dou and van Mieris in its employment of the window niche style that each had perfected in Leiden. It relates most obviously to Metsu in its depiction of a young man and a young woman making music, a subject in which “Metsu has proved the model for Netscher, whose known works in this style date from the middle sixties and later” (Robinson 94). The letterpress that accompanied Die Sängerin in the 1845 edition of Payne’s Royal Dresden Gallery included no information about Netscher’s life or career. Instead the text presented an elaborate fictional story about a banquet given by the Pope’s representative in the Hague in 1665.   

Viola, the blonde daughter of “a Colonel of the Pope’s life-guard,” leaves the political negotiations among the Dutch, French, and Italians to “play hostess in the chat room,” where a young Dutchman and a young Frenchman compete for her favor with an intensity that leads to a duel in which the Frenchman is killed, after which Viola dies and her Dutch defender “takes a vow of celibacy.” In the one episode of the story that relates to the engraving after the painting by Netscher, Viola is presented with “a splendid Neapolitan lute” and invites Geraart Van Sliuts, the Dutch admirer, to accompany her.  “Now began a performance that perfectly enraptured the auditors. Viola gave one of the noble melodies of Battagarini, with all the delicacy of tone and feeling that the theme requires: -- while the eyes of Geraart were fixed on those of his mistress, with an expression that spoke the feelings of his heart, plainer than words” (1: 63).   

Melville owned another engraving after a musical scene by Netscher in his copy of Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland (facing p. 78). The only painting by Netscher reproduced by Gower is A Music Lesson (fig. 2). Gower in general has a low opinion of Netscher’s “conversation pieces.” He dismisses most of them as paintings “in which richly costumed men and women, in all the heavy gorgeousness of the fashions of the time of William and Mary and the court of Versailles, are engaged in the social banalities and courtesies of their artificial lives.” About The Music Lesson, he declares only that “Netscher has given us the elaborately curled gallant superintending a young lady’s lesson on the double-bass; a page attends with hat in hand” (77).  

The above engraving in Melville’s book collection related very well to several of those in his print collection. The double bass leaning against the body of the young woman who is playing it relates nicely to its counterpart leaning to the left in the foreground of Melville’s print of Van Mieris in his Studio. Here the instrument is being activated by a young woman like the one who is singing in Melville’s  engraving after Netscher’s Singing Lady and Gentleman playing the Lute. The music master supervising her lesson, like the young gentleman accompanying the singing lady, is attending to her with his eyes as well as his ears. 

The painting from which The Music Lesson was made appears in Gower’s detailed list of Netscher’s “Principal Works” as A Lesson on the Bass Viol at the Louvre (116), where it remains today (fig. 3).  

Since this painting entered the Louvre in the eighteenth century, it may well have been seen in person by Allan Melvill in 1802-03 and 1818 and by his son Herman in 1849. This painting does have a Turkish rug covering the table on the left, but it is entirely eclipsed by the bright sheen of the white satin gown and the soft brown shape of the bass viol angling across the gown, each leading up to the white expanse of the young lady’s upper body as her one hand fingers the frets while the other strokes the strings with the press of the bow as the music master above her and the page beside her look on.