When the art collection of Adriaan Bout, agent of the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm, was auctioned in 1733, the painting that fetched the highest price was The Duet (Plate 1; 1658) by Frans van Mieris the Elder. At 3,000 guilders, it was almost seven times the price of Rembrandt's Song of Simeon, which had once belonged to Stadhouder Frederik Hendrik. The Duet, completed early in Van Mieris's career, already shows the qualities that would make him one of the most famous Dutch painters of his age. With his characteristically polished manner of painting, Van Mieris puts his stamp on a pictorial type—music making by elegant figures in a refined domestic space—that today has become almost synonymous with Dutch genre painting from the second half of the seventeenth century. Working within a familiar pictorial idiom, Van Mieris nevertheless asserts his personal artistic identity through a stylized elegance and vivid, lifelike details in this painting. As such, it exemplifies the pictorial phenomenon at the center of this study: the creation of distinctions through purposeful repetition.

With The Duet, Van Mieris participated in an exchange among artists who were experimenting in the so-called high-life genre painting in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. In the early 1650s Gerard ter Borch introduced compositions representing encounters between upper-class figures that were distinct in appearance and tone from the merry companies produced in the previous generation. Shortly thereafter artists including Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, Jan Steen, and Van Mieris produced adaptations of Ter Borch's novel pictorial type. The Duet, for example, bears a resemblance to Ter Borch's paintings in the tone of the scene and the figural types. In this painting, Van Mieris has limited the number of figures and arranged them in a compact pyramid, with the striking young woman at the apex, in the center of the painting. The slight tilt of her head to the right accentuates her long neck and sloping shoulders, her figure forming an elegant S-curve as she leans back from the harpsichord. Music was a common pictorial metaphor for love and harmony, yet here Van Mieris, again in a way similar to Ter Borch in his courtship pictures, offers a restrained interpretation of the amorous theme.