This universal love of music is attested by the Dutch and Flemish masters. In tavern scenes, as well as scenes of domestic and social life, musical instruments are frequently introduced. To catalogue the works of Jan Steen, Terborch, Teniers, Metsu, Van Mieris and other painters of the seventeenth century directly inspired by music, such as musical parties, harpsichord lessons, duets, lute-players, ladies at the spinet, etc., would be quite a task.
No home of wealth was complete without musical instruments, and owing to the exquisite paintings with which the case and top, both inside and out, were ornamented, the clavecin, harpsichord, or spinet was frequently the handsomest and costliest piece of furniture in the house. The case and legs were subject to changes in fashion. Sometimes the stand is simple with heavy ball feet connected by stretchers, as shown in Plate XXIII, a _Lady Playing the Spinet_, by J. M. Molenaer, in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam. Sometimes the instrument stands on baluster legs and arches; and sometimes case and stand are of lacquer in the prevailing taste for the Chinese style. The top was always delicately painted, as shown in the picture just referred to; and it is interesting to note that in nearly every case where a lady is playing an instrument, she rests her foot upon a foot-warmer.
Without being able to see the internal mechanism, it is difficult to define the precursors of the pianoforte from their outward appearance in the pictures.
These instruments were so beautifully decorated that the clavecin-makers of Antwerp ranked as artists and became members of the St. Luke’s Guild of that city. They were first enrolled as “painters and sculptors,” and not as clavecin-makers.
According to a pamphlet entitled _Recherches sur les Facteurs de Clavecins et les Luthiers d’Anvers_, by the Chevalier Léon de Burbure (Brussels, 1863), at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the clavichord was in greater vogue than the clavecin, and about 1500 the clavecin had been made into the clavichord shape in Venice and called the spinet. The new form soon travelled to the Netherlands and superseded the clavichord.
PLATE XX.—_Cabinet, or Armoire, by De Vries; Design for Goldsmith’s Work, by Jerome Cock._ ]