Violinist

A fiddler The painting depicts a man playing the violin, sitting on the window sill covered with a colourful carpet. In front of the player, on the sill, there is a book of sheet music. The wall under the window is decorated with a relief by Franz Duquesnay depicting putti playing with a goat. The painting is a 19th-century enlarged copy of a work by Gerard Dou (Gerrit Dou, born in 1613, died in 1675, both in Leiden). He was a Dutch painter, one of the prominent representatives of the 'Leiden school'. His paintings were always small-sized, and their characteristic feature was that the depicted scene was crowned with an arch (window, frame), as in the painting from Łańcut, where an arch closes the window at the top. The painter was Rembrandt's disciple from 1628; he also learned glass painting and copperplate engraving. Despite being invited to England by Charles II, he remained in Leiden, where, in 1648, he founded a school for guild painters that survived until the 19th century, although the time when painters were treated as craftsmen had passed. He frequently painted on a board as it had a smoother texture and was more suitable for reproducing small details, which he enjoyed as a painter. He was close to Rembrandt's style, and some of his works are attributed to them both. He used his learning of glass painting to introduce vibrant colours into his miniature paintings. The painting from Łańcut proves that, as the copyist, imitating Gerard Dou's style, used a diverse range of colours such as red, white, gold buttons in the violinist's costume or a colourful carpet on the window sill, although the whole picture is subdued, which was undoubtedly influenced by the 19th-century fashion.