A WOMAN ASLEEP
(Slapend meisje)
c. 1656–57
oil on canvas
34 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. (87.6 x 76.5 cm.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bequest of Benjamin Altman

The girl's face seems to resemble that of a young woman repeated in later paintings which some art experts believe to have been Catharina Bolnes, Vermeer's wife. According to Dutch costume expert Marieke de Winkel, who has examined the costumes of Vermeer's works, the maid wears a silk jacket and a pointed black cap called a til and a pair of pearl earrings, all refined accoutrements of the elevated social class.
"Most remarkable is a black patch on the girl's left temple called mouches, considered to be the height of fashion." Mouches were worn to prevent toothaches and headaches but they had become stylish for their optical effect, to make the skin appear whiter. Even though there is much written evidence of these patches, they appear only rarely in paintings of the time.
The Woman Asleep is Vermeer's first attempt at the domestic interior idiom pioneered by Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hoogh and Nicolas Maes. The composition contained a number of props and pictorial devices which would be repeated time and time again during his brief 20-year career. Although we cannot make out any detail, it may be safe to assume that this area represents a corner of a wall map, a popular and relatively cheap decorative solution for the bare walls of the household. More clearly depicted is the map's hanging rod (called rolle) that appears countless in Dutch genre interior paintings. Maps were usually glued on cloth to give them more consistency and to allow them to be rolled up for storage. The weight of the lower hanging rod maintained the map flat and the curious spherical balls on each end kept it from rubbing against the ever-humid Dutch walls. In simpler homes, they were simply attached with tacks.
Although modern scholars have speculated extensively on the presumed iconographic significance the objects of Vermeer’s composition, no convincing iconographic interpretation has been given to the map.
European painting by the great masters from Giotto and Ghirlandaio to Holbein, Van Eyck, Lotto, and Vermeer constantly depict carpets from Turkey and Iran. Their works are testimony to the exceptional value that the Oriental carpet had gained as a symbol of international taste. As with all costly imports, attempts were made to imitate or adapt them to preexisting European models.
With the rapid expansion of the foreign trade of the Netherlands, oriental carpets became very popular in the 16th and particular in the 17th century as decorative objects, usually laid over tables or chests with the knotted surface up. The Dutch normally placed them on tables to avoid wearing them down.
In nine of Vermeer's paintings we find such precious carpets, most with different patterns but always, presumably, painted from an existing model. Amazingly, in the Northern Netherlands only three carpets known to have been in Dutch possession in the 17th century have survived. The carpet in the present painting is most likely a Lotto with a Kilim style. By the 18th century, the fascination for oriental carpets had begun to wane due, perhaps, at least in part, to the inferior quality and quantity brought on by the decline of ruling dynasties of the East.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social rank. In this painting, Vermeer employed two different types of chairs in the painting which he never did again. The foreground chair was a later addition to the original concept of the composition. Its decorative lion-head finials became a standard feature of his interiors.
The chair on which the young woman is seated appears again in the late Love Letter, this time, the seat's decorative fringe can be clearly observed. One detail of Vermeer's rendering demonstrates that he was willing to truly employ extraordinary means to recreate the textural effect of the objects within his compositions. Laboratory analysis reveals the he applied actual gold leaf, accented with a dab of lead-tin yellow to capture the brilliance of the knob of the chair.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social rank. In this painting, Vermeer employed two different types of chairs in the painting which he never did again. The foreground chair was a later addition to the original concept of the composition. Its decorative lion-head finials became a standard feature of his interiors.
The chair on which the young woman is seated appears again in the late Love Letter, this time, the seat's decorative fringe can be clearly observed. One detail of Vermeer's rendering demonstrates that he was willing to truly employ extraordinary means to recreate the textural effect of the objects within his compositions. Laboratory analysis reveals the he applied actual gold leaf, accented with a dab of lead-tin yellow to capture the brilliance of the knob of the chair.
Amor Holding a Glass Orb
Cesar van Everdingen
c. 1660
89 x 102 cm
Private collection
The painting on the wall allows us to see part of the left leg of a standing child together with a mask. This heavily osbscured figure has been associated with two contemporary images: an emblem in Otto van Veen's popular Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608) and a standing putto or Cupid holding up a card, in the style of Cesar van Everdingen which Vermeer may have possessed.
Since a Cupid painting was mentioned in the death inventory of Vermeer in February 1676, it may correspond to the one listed in an inventory of household goods of the Thins-Vermeer residence at the end of the artist's life. According to Vermeer’s biographer John Michael Montias, "the fact that it was in the part of the estate that Maria Thins shared with Catharina Bolnes does not imply that it had always been there. It only gives us a very tentative hint that by the time the Girl Asleep at a Table was painted, Vermeer was already living in the Thins household."
Vermeer must have been attached to the Cupid painting since he employed it as a background element in The Girl Interrupted at Her Music and the Standing Lady at the Virginals where it appears in all its brashness, in both cases without a trace of a mask. Furthermore, it once assumed a dominant role in the early Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window but was painted out by the artist himself for an unknown reason.
Although worlds apart from a thematic point of view, the young Vermeer could have been easily impressed by Everdingen's superb technical skill which was much in demand. Everdingen's religious subjects in the middle years of the century are painted in a crisp and elegant style that recalls some passages of Vermeer's polished works of the 1670s.

The bowl which holds the fruit was commonly called a klapmut.
As the market for imported Chinese porcelain grew exponentially, oriental dealers began to shape their products according to European tastes and needs. One of the striking hybrids was a large soup dish called the klapmuts, which drew its name from the shape of a cheap, wool hat worn by the lower classes. The low flattened shape of the klapmuts allowed the European to dip his spoon in the bowl with ease and then rest it on the bowl's wide-brimmed border. The Chinese drank their broth soups directly from a bowl with steep vertical sides and had no use for the European version.
Couple with Parrot
Pieter de Hooch
1668
73 x 62 cm
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
Throughout his career Vermeer devised various means to enhance serene atmosphere of the private spaces. The vista opening into another room, called doorkijkje, appears in a number of Dutch interiors including the Idle Servant by Nicholaes Maes which no doubt served as Vermeer's compositional model.
Vermeer probably borrowed another version of the doorkijkje from de Hooch's Couple and Parrot for his own Love Letter painted some years later. He also painted at least one other doorway (which has not survived) described in the Dissius auction of 21 Vermeer paintings in Amsterdam auction in 1696, "a gentleman washing his hands in a see-through room with sculptures."
Since this rather complicated still life was overworked by Vermeer and ruined by later restorations, the whole area is tricky to decipher. Neither the objects nor their eventual iconographic meaning is entirely comprehensible.
The upper ceramic dish, a Wan-li bowl imported from China, contains various fruits, most likely apples and plums. To the left is a local Delft wine jug which appears in other paintings by Vermeer in a very conspicuous manner: the artist must have been very fond of its simple yet suggestive surface quality and shape. Next to the wine pitcher may be a short white jug resting on its side which is partially obscured by some confusing gauzy material. Beneath the wine jug remain the vestiges of a characteristic roemer glass which has suffered greatly from restorations and can be made out with difficulty. Slightly to the right of the roemer are a silver knife and what seems to be a spoon set curiously end-to-end. Above are a few nuts shells and a half-full wine glass which are barely visible.
To make matters worse for those brave historians who have attempted to divine the symbolic meaning of all this, was an empty plate near the girl's fingertips and some sprigs of grape vines both painted out by the artist himself. Other pentimenti, a dog and a standing cavalier, cast doubts as to the young artist's original intentions and show that he struggled with the ins and outs of the new interior genre mode which would very soon become the dominant mode of painting and the one for which he is renowned today.
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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

- (?) Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, Delft (d. 1674);
- (?) his widow, Maria de Knuijt, Delft (d. 1681);
- (?) their daughter, Magdalena van Ruijven, Delft (d. 1682);
- (?) her widower, Jacob Abrahamsz Dissius (d. 1695);
- Dissius sale, Amsterdam, 16 May 1696, no. 8, probably sale, Amsterdam (V. Postumus), 19 December 1737, no. 37, sold to Carpi;
- [probably J.B.P. Lebrun, Paris, in 1811];
- Smeth van Alphen et al. sale, Paris (Lebrun), April 1811, no. 150, sold to Alexandre-Joseph Paillet, in 1811;
- John Waterloo Wilson, Paris (after 1873-1881;
- his sale, Paris, 13-16 March 1881, no. 116, to Sedelmeyer, Paris, 1881, sold 1881 to Rodolphe Kann, Paris (d. 1905); his estate, 1905-07;
- sold to Duveen, London, 1907-08; sold 1908 to Benjamin Altman, New York (d. 1913);
- since 1913 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman (acc. no. 14.40.611).
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/




