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The painting shows two well-dressed young people in a somewhat sparsely but, nonetheless, expensively furnished interior. The young man plays a lute and the woman a cittern - an instrument like the lute, dating from the Renaissance, but with brass rather than gut strings, giving it a brighter, louder sound. The figures have been identified as Molenaer himself, and Judith Leyster, a fellow painter from Haarlem, whom he married in June 1636.
The painting is probably a marriage portrait, an allegory of conjugal harmony.
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