Musicians

The three Le Nain brothers — Antoine, Louis and Mathieu — were French painters working in the seventeenth century, specialising in scenes of peasant life and small-scale portraits. The three brothers worked in collaboration and did not sign their work individually (often signing only with their surname), making it difficult to attribute their paintings definitively to a single hand. This concert scene, however, has been widely accepted by art historians as being the work of Mathieu Le Nain (c. 1607-1677).

After conservation, brilliantly painted passages have emerged, such as the still life on the table, along with the figure of the boy to the right, theatrically dressed in slashed sleeves, who had previously been damaged by overcleaning. Interestingly, the same figure appears in an unfinished group portrait, Three Men and a Boy, at the National Gallery, London.