This small, quiet painting was the very first work by Johannes Vermeer to ever cross the Atlantic into an American collection, more than two centuries after he painted it.
What you're looking at
Vermeer painted this scene around 1662, showing a young woman standing at a window, one hand reaching toward a silver pitcher and basin, the other holding open a casement window. A map hangs on the wall behind her. It's a small, private moment of ordinary domestic life, built almost entirely from the quality of window light falling across the room.
The first Vermeer in America
When this painting entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889, it was the first painting by Vermeer to reach any collection in the United States. At the time, Vermeer was still a relatively obscure figure outside the Netherlands: he had been largely overlooked for nearly two centuries after his death before being rediscovered by the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger in the 1860s, only a few decades before the Met acquired this canvas.
The painting itself is small, just over 45 by 40 centimeters, a whole quiet world contained in a canvas you could hold in two hands. Vermeer built his reputation on scenes exactly like this one: a single figure, a window, light, and almost nothing else happening.
One detail to look for
Look at the silver pitcher and basin catching the window light. Vermeer renders the metal's highlights with small, precise dabs of paint, a technique he used across several of his interior scenes to suggest reflected light without painting every detail literally.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 45.7 x 40.6 cm. Shop the canvas print.