Young Couple Drinking Wine

Ter Borch painted this scene of a young couple sharing wine in the 1650s, in Deventer in the eastern Netherlands. He was in his thirties, the leading genre painter of the Dutch Republic after the death of Vermeer's teacher Carel Fabritius, and he had perfected a technique for painting satin that no one in Europe could match. A young woman in a white satin dress sits at a table, holding a glass of wine. A young man stands behind her, his hand on the back of her chair, leaning in to speak. A dog sits at the lower left, looking up at the couple. The room is plain, with a dark wall and a window at the left. The light falls on the woman's dress, the glass, and the dog, leaving the man in partial shadow. The painting is a genre scene, a picture of everyday life, but it carries a moral subtext. In Dutch 17th-century culture, a man and woman drinking together suggested courtship, and the dog at their feet was a symbol of fidelity. The painting could be read as a scene of innocent courtship or as a warning about the dangers of wine and flirtation. Ter Borch left the interpretation open. Ter Borch was born in Zwolle in 1617 and spent most of his career in Deventer, a small town in the eastern Netherlands. He traveled to Spain in the 1640s, where he painted portraits of the Spanish court, then returned to Deventer and produced the genre scenes for which he is best known. His paintings of women in satin dresses were widely copied by his contemporaries, including Vermeer and Metsu, and his technique for rendering the sheen of silk was studied by every Dutch genre painter who came after him. Oil on panel, 60 by 47 centimeters, roughly 24 by 19 inches. Ter Borch painted on a smooth wood panel, building the satin dress in thin layers of white and grey over a light ground. The sheen of the silk is rendered with tiny horizontal strokes of lead white, catching the light from the window. The surface is smooth and highly finished, with no visible brushwork at normal viewing distance. The vertical format and warm subject make this print work well in a dining room, living room, or bedroom. The satin dress and the wine glass reward close viewing. A dark wood frame suits the painting's Dutch interior. The 11x14 or 12x16 size gives the dress and the figures enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.