Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Guitar Player, c.1670. Oil on canvas, 53 × 46.3 cm. English Heritage, Kenwood House, London
Painted in Delft around 1670, The Guitar Player depicts a young woman seated with a baroque guitar, her glance turning outward with an immediacy unusual in Vermeer’s work. The guitar itself was a novel instrument in the Dutch Republic of the late seventeenth century, its Spanish origins and fashionable associations marking it as both exotic and modern. Its appearance in the painting situates the work within a broader cultural context in which music-making was not only a genteel accomplishment but also a medium freighted with allegorical meaning.
In Dutch art of the Golden Age, musical instruments carried a rich range of associations. They could symbolise harmony within marriage, the fleeting pleasures of earthly life, or, more specifically, the coded rituals of courtship. The guitar in particular, with its relatively simple chords and strummed accompaniments, was often connected with spontaneity and amorous expression, qualities distinct from the more cerebral reputation of the lute. Vermeer’s choice of subject therefore reflects a moment of cultural transition, and the woman’s animated expression — smiling, alert, caught in an instant of interruption — conveys a vitality that distinguishes this work from his more restrained musical interiors such as The Music Lesson (Royal Collection, London) or The Concert (formerly Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston).
The painting is also significant for its technical handling. The characteristic left-hand fall of light illuminates the sitter’s yellow jacket and the polished surface of the guitar, but the brushwork is less precise than in Vermeer’s earlier pictures. The looseness of his modelling and the freer use of colour lend the canvas a more spontaneous character, consistent with the subject’s sense of immediacy. The painting was never relined on anew support, an unusual survival that preserves the original canvas and support and allows us to sense its fragile, unaltered state, although at the cost of physical vulnerability.
The work also has an extraordinary modern history. In February 1974 it was stolen from Kenwood House in a notorious art theft that drew widespread attention. The empty frame was discovered discarded on Hampstead Heath in North London, while the painting itself resurfaced months later in the cemetery of St Bartholomew’s, propped against a gravestone, wrapped in newspaper and bound with string. Although ultimately recovered, the perpetrators were never identified, and the episode only deepened the aura of mystery that has long surrounded Vermeer’s small and fragile oeuvre of thirty-six paintings.