This is the Lute Player by Bernardo Cavallino (1616-1656), a seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter who clearly knew how to dramatise a jam session. There’s a musical score casually splayed on the table, perhaps an indication that the lute player has composed a little something earlier in the day given that’s rather obviously the star of the show in this painting. The gallery notes that this is a “genre picture that is characterised by incidents observed from real life in a seemingly spontaneous manner” rather than a more formal painting. The whole thing is slightly moody, theatrical and ever so slightly over the top, a rather different style of artwork from the staid character portraits that are littered about the gallery.