"By Metsu's favor we are able to penetrate into those interiors which are so jealously closed to strangers. Most often it is by a window that serves as a frame for his picture that Metsu gives us access to the boudoirs of fashionable ladies, and makes us take them by surprise, sometimes in velvet déshabille writing their secrets; sometimes finishing their toilette in view of a hoped-for visit; and sometimes breathing over the keys of their clavecin the sighs of their hearts and the thoughts they do not express."
His Carefulness in selecting Details.—"Metsu rarely paints an interior without introducing the pet spaniel of the period, which often contributes much to our comprehension of the scene by the character of its attitude.
"There are some Dutch masters who unintelligently accumulate innumerable details everywhere. They make a picture of manners the pretext for a ridiculous display of furniture, crystal, lustres, chinoisarie and curiosities of every kind; their interiors resemble bazaars. Metsu puts beside his subjects only those details necessary to make the intrigue clear, and to explain the conversation.
His Treatment of Still Life.—"However great may have been his talent for painting still life, he never allowed himself to be carried away, like so many others, by that vulgar pleasure; but, on the other hand, what finish! what a precious touch! And then how he loves to give full value to the beauties of local color, or to shade a Turkey carpet, or to grade down the lights on gold and silver vases. What pleasure he takes in the Bohemian glasses and the transparent liquors that half fill them! The glasses in his pictures have great importance, for the life of a retired Dutchman is spent in continual smoking and drinking; but in Metsu we no longer see the Pantagruelesque glasses of several stages that Van Ostade's peasants always have in their hands; these are fine and more discrete glasses, of elegant form, tall and oblong glasses in which the Haarlem beer froths; glasses cut and fashioned in twenty different ways, octagon glasses each facet of which ends with a curve and which cut the light with their sharp edges, or glasses the calyx of which forms a reversed cone on a heron's claw, or elongates into a swan's neck, and finishes like a trumpet; lastly, the glasses of the grandparents, sometimes of an imperishable thickness and solidity, sometimes as delicate, light, and thin as an onion skin."[15]
Favorite Subjects.—Metsu is fond of representing the patricians of his day and their womankind either in pleasant entertainment, or, more frequently, in individual figures engaged in quiet work. A picture of this class is The Amateur Musicians. The lady on the left is very quietly playing her instrument with the same sense of repose that is expressed by the lady who seems to be writing down the notes. Only on the face of the elegant gentleman standing behind her chair is painted a merry, almost roguish, smile.
METSU
The Amateur Musicians
The Elegance of Metsu's Figures.—The figures are drawn with certainty; the artistic handling of the subject is remarkable; and a fine feeling for color is shown in the selection of the tones. In Metsu's figures we notice an elegance and a nobility which are not found elsewhere except in Ter Borch.
The Influence of other Artists on Metsu.—It is strange that the earliest works of Metsu, which are the most broadly painted ones, show little of Dou's influence, which is always so unmistakable in his pupils, so that Bode believes he finds in them the working of Hals's influence; and, in fact, the large pictures of Metsu's early period are painted with a broad brush in Hals's gray tones. When Metsu removed to Amsterdam, he fell more under Rembrandt's influence, and the beautiful chiaroscuro of his later works incontestably proves this.
His Miscellaneous Works.—Metsu's Biblical and allegorial pictures are the least important of his works. Besides The Amateur Musicians, signed by Metsu, the Mauritshuis possesses a fine Portrait of a Huntsman dated 1661, and a great academical, constrained allegory of Justice Protecting the Widow and Orphan, a picture that was found in the vestibule of a house in Leyden in 1667. It was painted in 1655.