A Concert of Putti in a Landscape, Oil on Panel, Flemish School 17th Century, Period Gilded Frame

Five infants make music on a grass bank at the foot of a rocky outcrop. One sits at the left with an open score across his knee. Beside him a second raises a slender pipe to his lips. A third stands at the centre, a length of pink drapery wound about his hips and one arm lifted with the index finger raised, beating time for the others. To the right a fourth plays a shawm with a flared bell, and in the foreground a fifth lies flat on his stomach, head turned out toward the viewer, a second open score on the ground before him.

Behind them the ground rises into broken rock and dark foliage. The sky fills the upper third of the panel, grey blue and heavily clouded, with one pale opening at the right where the trees thin out. Against that weight the flesh of the children is the brightest thing in the picture.

Painted on a small wood panel in the cabinet tradition, the work belongs to the Flemish school of the seventeenth century. It is presented in a deep gilded frame carved with palmettes and a beaded inner moulding, which shows small losses.