The Dissus Sale of 1696

No. 10 "A gentleman and a young lady making music in a room, by the same" 81-0

Girl Interrupted in her Music by Johannes Vermeer

Girl Interrupted in her Music
Johannes Vermeer

Description no. 10 may refer to Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Walter Liedtke thinks this is the case, although Blankert has disdained a provenance for the painting having excluded it from the master's oeuvre. One argument against an attribution is the relatively high price it fetched at the auction. Even though the painting is now in a very poor state of conservation, neither the its reduced dimensions or its remaining visible qualities seem to merit such an elevated price. The Concert, once in the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum stolen in 1990, also represents a gentleman and a young lady making music. However, the description does not take into account a second young woman who is beating time and singing. Either the author of the auction list did not feel she was a significant feature of the painting or otherwise the painting described is now lost.