A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman, 'The Music Lesson'

A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman entered the Royal Collection in 1762 as a work by Frans van Mieris the Elder owing to a misreading of the signature. Indeed, the name of the artist was not correctly identified until 1866 by Thophile Thor. During the late seventeenth century the picture had been in collections in Delft, Vermeer's home town, including that eventually sold on 16 May 1696 by Jacob Dissous which had twenty-one paintings by the artist - the largest group of such works assembled by a single individual.