A WOMAN ASLEEP

In A Girl Asleep, the Soldier and Laughing Girl and the Dresden Letter Reader Vermeer's matter is stated in a vocabulary not essentially different from that current among his contemporaries. In The Letter Reader the hands are modeled with almost painful attention to the known anatomical form; the same uneasy linear definition of these details appears in the Frick picture. Both reveal the painter with a manner which is the antithesis of that which he later developed.

Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, 1952

c. 1657
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1656-1657
Walter Liedtke (Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

literature

exhibitions

Before Vermeer settled on his now-famous interiors, he experimented with a number of motifs and styles. He painted two Biblical themes (one lost), two motifs drawn form Classical mythology (another lost work) and one "bordello" scene which belonged to popular genre in the 1620s and 1630s. After these tentative forays, he approached the "modern" mode which consisted in painting with the utmost fidelity a few, discreet figures set in well-to-do contemporary interiors, the first of which is the Maid Asleep.

Due to the variety of themes and techniques in these early works, Vermeer specialist Walter Liedtke posits that there exists no unequivocal sign of a single master's influence. "Indeed, if a newly discovered document revealed that in his mid- or late-teens Vermeer studied with any particular painter, it would not clarify much.

A stronger bond between master and pupil might have diminished the artist's ability to absorb ideas from diverse sources and to make intuitive connections between them. Perhaps these talents were nurtured by beginning as an apprentice but as an art dealer's son."

This painting is considered Vermeer's first surviving genre interior. Genre paintings depict scenes or events from everyday life. The term genre is French word meaning a "type" or "sort," and did not acquire its current art historical usage until the late 19th century. During the 17th century, genre paintings were occasionally referred to by the general term beeldeken—meaning "painting with little figures"—but were more commonly categorized according to their specific subject matter. Coortegardjes, for example, portray soldiers at rest or play, while conversaties feature fashionable young men and women eating, drinking and playing musical instruments together. In addition to these popular subjects, genre paintings also frequently depict taverns, kitchens, open-air markets, and festive occasions such as weddings, births, or holidays.

The opening page of Houwelijk
1625
Jacob Cats

Many genre paintings drew on familiar sayings or illustrated books like Jacob Cats' immensely popular Houwelijk (On Marriage), which was first published in 1625 and sold, according to contemporary estimates, some 50,000 copies. It gave advice on the proper comportment of women from girlhood to widowhood and death.

Emblem books were another popular form of "wisdom literature" that advised on the proper conduct of all aspects of life, from love and childbearing to economic, social, and religious responsibility. These books encapsulated a concept with an illustration and pithy slogan, amplified by an accompanying poem.

In the mid-1650s, Vermeer joined contemporary genre painters like Gerard ter Borch, Nicolaes Maes and Gabriel Metsu in depicting domestic interiors. He shared with these artists an interest in edifying or didactic themes supported by emblematic elements. To what extent Vermeer endowed A Maid Asleep with iconographic conventional wisdom remains a subject of conjecture.

Seymour Slive sought to explain the picture as a kind of warning against the excesses of drink pointing out the over-turned roemer and the half-full wineglass. Slive downplayed the importance of the Cupid which hangs above the girl's head. Madlyn Millner Kahr on the other hand saw the painting to symbolize disillusioned and disappointed love, hence the maids dejected posture.

Peter L. Donhauser, instead, saw key to the work in a small detail. At the center of the painting, the near edge of the open door is interrupted in what appears to be the ring of a key. Visual and literary sources of the period link keys with domestic responsibility, duty, and fidelity, implying the privilege of access and closely associated with housewives and housemaids. Keys also had a sexual connotation, alluding either to lustful behavior or to female virginity. The key was additionally used by Nicolaes Maes, Samuel von Hoogstraten, and Jan Steen as a metaphor for significance, a literal clavis interpretandi, intended to draw attention to a particular detail crucial to the understanding of a picture; and Vermeer could well have employed the motif in a similar manner.

The Idle Servant
Nicolaes Maes
1655
70 x 53 cm
National Gallery, London

In the early part of the 17th century, genre paintings tended to have clear allegorical content. Such works warned of the vanities of worldly pleasures, the dangers of vice, the perils of drink and smoke, the laxness of an old woman or a sloth of a maid. Genre painting served both to reflect and define ideals about the family, love, courtship, duty, and other aspects of life. By mid-century, most genre pictures had become less obviously didactic.

A key to understanding the girl's attitude was once founded on the catalogue description of the 1696 sale of the painting as "a drunken, sleeping maid at a table." In fact, on the table before her lies not one but two glasses and a wine jug. Originally, there were also some grape leaves to the left-hand side of the still life later eliminated by the artist. A small wine-glass stands almost empty within the girl's reach while an overturned glass at the near side of the table beside the white wine jug is a roemer of the kind used by men. Today, neither of them is immediately apparent. Perhaps the woman's glass was deliberately concealed but the overturned roemer has been obscured by overzealous cleaning.

However, this traditional interpretation has been challenged by Arthur Wheelock who concludes that the young girl's pose "does not indicate that she is asleep, nor does it appear to represent sloth in Maes' painting (The Idle Servant, the unmistakable model for Vermeer's composition). In this context, the girl's pose seems to refer to another iconographic tradition in which the figure rests its head on its hand: melancholia. Melancholia was an affliction widely associated in the 17th century with depression, self-absorbed reflection, artistic creativity and unhappy love affairs." For Wheelock, the motive of the young girl's distress is disclosed within the picture itself. The visible portion of the painting behind her, although small, is enough to identify it with a contemporary emblem which speaks of the serenity of love and the overcoming of deceit.

During the course of the painting process, Vermeer strongly revised his initial concept of the work which, as Arthur Wheelock put it, consisted in relating two isolated "vignettes."

X-radiographs demonstrate that Vermeer had more of a story to tell and had included a dog in the doorway which stared at a standing gentleman sporting a broad-rimmed hat in farthest reaches the back room. Furthermore, grape leaves lay over the fruit of the present-day still life and the chair in the foreground was eventually added to diminish visual access to the far room.

Vermeer also cut down the picture on all four sides thereby increasing the importance of the figure in respects to the environment. The numerous alterations reveals that the artist was willing to sacrifice narrative clarity in favor of a more poetic image allowing the viewer greater latitude in interpreting the scene. Moreover, by simplifying the composition, he enhanced the visual impact of the work by eliminating unessential, distracting elements.

Such compositional and iconographic revisions are an important characteristic of Vermeer's slow, meditative painting process. His incessant search for the most balanced and effective image possible finds few equals among European artists.

Ascribing precise iconographic meaning to a painting by Vermeer has often proved vexing, the Girl Asleep being a perfect example. In some cases even the social identity of the sitters themselves has been questioned. Although many critics have described the figure as a drunken maid, Arthur Wheelock believes that she may have been a mistress due to her refined dress. Consequentially, she does not represent a slothful maid but a young upper-class woman distraught by questions of love.

However, such an elegant dress does not necessarily rule out her being a maid. Overdressed maids had become a predicament in the Netherlands. An Amsterdam regulation of 1681 forbade household servants from wearing silk garments and jewelry like those donned by Vermeer's young woman. In popular literature, maids were often cast as a threat to the security of the home, the center of Dutch life. Maids were frequently the subject of contemporary plays and popular writing. As Simon Schama wrote, in the 17th-century maids were "indisputably regarded as the most dangerous women of all..."

Although the study of iconography (hidden symbolic meaning) in 17th-century Dutch art has been a subject which has fascinated scholars for a good part of the 20th century, there remain numerous unresolved questions. Although it is clear that Dutch painters did purposely imbue their works with non-visual meaning not immediately apparent to the modern viewer, it is not known to what extent they did so or the sources they used.

Unfortunately, no contemporary texts, if they ever existed, have survived that might help to explain either how or to what degree genre painters should employ symbolic meaning in their works. Perhaps the simplest explanation of this lacuna is that everyone, including the lower class, already knew their meaning quite well. Thus, what was common knowledge in those times and had no reason to be written has become in our time a suggestive, but largely uncertain, science.

Vermeer's paintings have attracted a considerable share of interpretation but have resisted any definitive or consistent solution. It would appear that some paintings are laden with conventional symbolism (Allegory of Faith, Woman Holding a Balance and The Art of Painting) while other paintings seem devoid of anything but purely pictorial meaning. Some scholars have hypothesized that the artist took advantage of the contradictory nature of contemporary symbols to imbue his works with poetic depth rather than with overt didactic meaning leaving the meaning open to the spiritual necessities of different viewers.

The Woman Asleep presents one of the most complex problems in Vermeer's oeuvre.

View of an Interior, or The Slippers
Samuel van Hoogstraten
between 1654 and 1662
103 cm x 70 cm
Louvre, Paris

Within the history of western art, the door stands for an image of both physical or metaphysical transformation. In Dutch genre painting of the mid-17th century, this visual fascination in the door appears to have reached its peak. Indeed, the interest of Dutch genre paintings appears almost obsessive.

As art historian Georgina Cole pointed out, "By the 1650s and 60s, doors—doorways, open doors, half-open doors, even closed doors—can be found in the paintings of each province and in the work of almost every known genre painter. They feature heavily in the interior paintings of artists such as Pieter Saenredam, Emmanuel de Witte, Nicolaes Maes, Jacob Ochtervelt, Pieter de Hooch, and Samuel Van Hoogstraten, opening out onto streets, courtyards, and other rooms." Vermeer is known to have painted at least three interiors with doorways.

Doorways create open gaps in interiors, defining outside and inside, heightening the viewer's sensation of an enclosed "insideness" into which one may enter or escape. Consequently, the space of the doorway takes on a character of "in-betweenness" and functions as a subliminal invitation to participate in the narrative which unfolds within the depicted image.

In the genre scenes of Jacob Ochtervelt and Nicolaes Maes, the doorway signified the boundary between two social worlds: the civic and the domestic. The doorway also divides buyer from seller. In one such work, The Milk Seller, seen from the street side of the domestic divide, an old woman carefully counts out coins into the hand of a brusque-looking mother on the doorstep, the Dutch two-part door. Ochtervelt created a number of doorways which show beggars who at the threshold of an open doorway solicit offerings to members (female) of a well-appointed bourgeoisie interior. Beggars and vendors are always kept outside the door, and their contact with the domestic interior through the doorway is strictly governed by the rules of economic transaction.

On the other hand, Vermeer and de Hooch employ the doorway inside the same interior to create a sense of spatial depth and emotional depth and as a boundary which divides the viewer of the painting and the figures who are being viewed. Both artists seemed to have drawn their models from the work of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Hoogstraten's pioneering use of illusionism, an important aspect of Dutch art practices can itself be seen as the definition of a space between the spectator's world and that of painter's representation of the world.

Critics generally agree that so-called pictures-within-pictures were meant to convey comment on the scene which takes place below. The interpretation of this picture has been particularly problematic. Lawrence Gowing supposed that the inclusion of the mask in the Cupid painting (the Cupid's left-hand foot can barely be made out) has illuminated the theme with a typical reference; sleep admits a fantasy of love.

If the fallen mask were to signify deceit, rather than being drunk, the young girl may be feigning sleep to her lover who is about to appear. In fact Vermeer had once painted a standing cavalier in the back room, seen through the door, but then painted it out.

Nicolas Vallet (c. 1583-c.1642)
Slaep, soete slaep (Sleep, sweet sleep) [2MB]
Konrad Ragossnig, lute
http://www.konradragossnig.com/