The Singing Party

Attributed to Philip Mercier

National Gallery of Art

Five men and boy, all with pale skin, crowd around a book of music propped on a wooden stand on a piano or similar instrument in this horizontal painting. Light falls across the scene from high to our left. The boy is closest to us, in the lower left corner. Shown from the shoulders up, he holds an open book but looks up at the keyboardist. His lips are mouth parted and his face deep in shadow. Three of the men appear to sing, one plays a bassoon, and the keyboardist plays with grim determination, his downturned lips pressed tightly together. The keyboardist’s eyebrows are lowered under a high forehead. He wears a long, gray wig and a gray jacket. The bassoonist is over his shoulder to our left. He appears to be bald or balding and wears a frilly white cravat tucked into an ochre-yellow vest. His eyes and cheeks bulge as he plays, his lips pressed around the reeds. The brown suits of the other three men nearly blend into the wall behind them, and they all have chin-length gray hair, presumably wigs. The man to our far left glares down at a book with his dark brows arched up and away from his nose, and his lopsided mouth open wide. The man next to him leans in to look at the book in front of the pianist, and the third singer, to the far right, lifts one hand as he opens his mouth wide, his brows gathered, and his wig pushed back on his head.