A Couple Making Music at a Table, with a Serving Girl depicts a clearly wealthy merchant couple playing music. Pieter de Hooch was a genre painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of prosperity and excellence in the arts in the Netherlands.
He was also a contemporary, and fellow member of the Guild of St. Luke, of the world-famous painter Vermeer The man expressively sings while the woman plays the lute at a table in front of an open window bathed in the evening light. The serving girl stands listening with her back to us, perhaps because of this we can identify with her because we too are spectators. It was painted in 1680 at the height of his painting career.
Pieter de Hooch’s A Couple Making Music at a Table, with a Serving Girl is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.