Elegant Company Making Music
by CODDE, Pieter, Oil on panel, 31 x 41 cm
Together with Dirck Hals, Hendrick Pot and Willem Buytewech, Pieter Codde played a key role in the development of high class genre painting in the first half of the seventeenth century. He concentrated on producing interiors populated with elegant, merrymaking figures, often making music as in the present example. This composition appears to have been popular as he executed a number of further versions, all of varying degrees of quality.