Jacob Ochtervelt

Interior: The Music Lesson

c.1670
City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham 
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Interior: The Music Lesson, Jacob Ochtervelt

OCHTERVELT, Jacob
b. 1634, Rotterdam, d. 1682, Amsterdam

Ochtervelt was a Dutch genre painter active mainly in Rotterdam, but from 1674 he lived in Amsterdam. He was influenced by Pieter de Hooch and through him by Vermeer. Apart from a few portraits and some early hunting party and "merry company" scenes, his paintings are almost all elegant upper-class interiors, in which he showed off a skill in painting silks and satins to rival that of Terborch. His figures are extremely refined, but there is often a sexual element in his painting.