The Dissus Sale of 1696

Diego Duarte   "a  lady playing the clavecin, with accessories, by Vermeer"
A lady Seated at the Virginals
A Lady Seated at the Virginals
Johannes Vermeer

Diego Duarte was an immensely wealthy Antwerp jeweler and banker.  "It is suggestive that Duarte maintained contact with Holland through Constantijn Huygens the Younger, who, like Larson, lived in The Hague. Duarte's father had a clavecin made for Huygens, and Duarte corresponded with Huygens about music. He also was an accomplished organist and composer. With the musical interests it is appropriate that Duarte's Vermeer represented in his inventory number 182  "a small painting with a lady playing the clavecin, with accessories."1 The picture was valued at 150 guilders. This may have been either the Lady Standing at the Virginals or the Lady Seated at the Virginals  both in the National Gallery of London although most Vermeer scholars tend to believe that the painting in question is the latter. Whichever it was, the other was in the Van Ruijven-Dissius collection.2


  1. Albert Blankert  (with contributions by  Rob Rurrs and Willem Avn de Watering), Vermeer, Oxford.  1978
  2. John Michael  Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History, Princeton, 1989 
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