The Dissus Sale of 1696
in a perspectival room with figures, artful and rare, by ditto" 95-0
The Love Letter
Johannes Vermeer
Couple with a Parrot
Pieter de Hoogh
Woman Washing Her Hands
Gerard ter Borch
View of an Interior, or
The Slippers
(traditional title, given in the 19th
century)
attributed to
Samuel van Hoogstraten
c. 1654-62
Louvre
At first thought, the subject of the painting, a gntleman washing his hands, would almost seem wntirely extraneous to Vermeer’s oeuvre and to subject matter of the Dutch genre painters. As Vermeer expert Albert Blankert has pointed out, no other Dutch genre painting displays a gentleman washing his hands. However, in about 1655, Gerrit Terborch painted a woman washing her hands that may have later been a source of inspiration for Vermeer's own depiction of the subject. At that time of Terborch's work the young Vermeer was still at grips with religious, historical or genre themes and had not yet tirned his attention to interiors as Terborch had done for years. The "washing of the hands" was most probably an allegory of the cleansing of one’s soul. Terborch's influence on Vermeer has always been supposed by scholars and a recently discovered document demonstrates that Vermeer had actually met Terborch in Delft in shortly after Vermeer's marriage. In 1675, the year of Vermeer's death, Eglon van der Neer also took up the subject in a picture now in the Mauritshuis.
Les Pantoufles (now in the Louvre) by Hoogstraten curiously contains both the see-through room element and a painting by Terborch on the far wall framed in black ebony similar to those found in Vermeer's The Love Letter.
The most surprising and suggestive description of a lost Vermeer in the Dissius auction is without doubt item no. 5. However, if carefully examined, the painting may not be so distant from our imagination as it would first seem. The pictorial device of the "perspectival room," in fact, was experimented at least another time by Vermeer in his late The Love Letter and in the earlier Maid Asleep. This pictorial devise was frequently employed by other Dutch genre painters as well, De Hoogh's Couple with a Parrot (right) is an excellent example. Both paintings have in common other elements such as the broom leaning in the picture's foreground, the hanging curtain and the whicker wash basket. One of the two artists had certainly inspired the other. Scholars generally date De Hoogh’s painting before Vermeer’s.