In 1638, the private secretary of Charles I, Sir F. Windebank, had a long correspondence with a painter named Balthazar Gerbier, then in Brussels, regarding the purchase of a virginal in Antwerp for the King of England. Gerbier described one made by Hans Ruckers for the Infanta. It had a double keyboard and four stops and was beautifully painted. The picture inside the cover was Cupid and Psyche by Rubens. This instrument was bought for £30, but was unsatisfactory on account of insufficient compass. Gerbier was asked to exchange it, but he wrote back that the maker had not another on sale.
Andries Ruckers, another son of the elder Hans, was born in 1579. In 1619, the Guild of St. Luke ordered a clavecin from him. The Museum of the Brussels Conservatory owns one dated 1613, with one keyboard and four octaves. The Musée Archéologique of Bruges owns a bent side one, dated 1624, of 5 octaves and 3 stops, and the Musée du Steen, Antwerp has a bent side one, undated, with 3 stops and two keyboards, the lower one 4 octaves and the upper 3¾ octaves. In the South Kensington Museum there is another by Andries Ruckers, said to have been Handel’s. This is dated 1651, and inscribed Sic transit Gloria Mundi and Acta Virum Probant. On the belly of the instrument, of the bent side shape, a concert of monkeys is represented. One monkey is conducting.
Andries Ruckers the younger, born in 1617, married a daughter of Dirck de Vries, also a clavecin-maker. The Château de Perceau, near Cosné, owned a bent side clavecin by Andries the younger, dated 1655. Its case was painted in blue camaïeu in the rococo style. This passed to a private collector.
Christofel Ruckers was the last important member of this family of clavecin-makers.
A beautifully decorated clavecin occurs in the picture of The Young Scholar and His Sister, by Cocx (Coques) in the Cassel Gallery. The room is decorated with hangings of blue leather, ornamented with gold, above which hang pictures in ebony frames. The young man is seated at a table beneath the window and his sister is at the clavecin opposite. The latter is exquisitely painted, the top showing the story of Apollo and Marsyas.
Plate XXII.—Design for Goldsmith’s Work, by Adrian Collaert.
In the latter part of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries, the bass viol was much played in England, France and the Low Countries and was called the viol da gamba. This instrument frequently appears in the works of the Dutch masters, in which not unfrequently ladies are represented playing it, as, for example, in Jan Verkolje’s (1650–93) Musical Party in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, where the lady is seated upon a low-backed leather chair with her foot upon a foot-warmer. The instrument is turned from the spectator.
The lute, which so frequently appears in early pictures, was superseded about 1600 by the theorbo, or double-necked lute with two sets of strings and two sets of tuning pegs. The theorbo is represented in Terborch’s Lute-Player in The Cassel Gallery; a lute also appears in Van Mieris’s The Painter and his Wife in the Hague Gallery, a charming domestic picture, in which the painter is teasing a puppy and its mother. The lute lies carelessly on the table.
Brassware contributed very greatly to the brightness and cheerfulness of an apartment during the Renaissance period as well as during the centuries before and after. The chandelier with its graceful curves appears in many a picture; and the best art of the day was devoted to the hearth-furnishings. Dogs and andirons assumed large proportions and considerable decorative importance. An interesting Flemish dog of the sixteenth century is represented in Fig. 28. It is similar to those metal andirons on the hearth in Plate [XXIV]. Besides human and animal figures, this kind of dinanderie assumed many other forms. Other kinds of dinanderie, consisting of candlesticks of human figures in contemporary costumes are shown in Fig. 29 and Fig. 30.