Woman with a Lute
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''Woman with a Lute'', also known as ''Woman with a Lute Near a Window'', is a painting created about 1662–1663 by Dutch painter
Johannes Vermeer Johannes Vermeer ( , , see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately succe ...
and now at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
in New York. The painting depicts a young woman wearing an ermine-trimmed jacket and enormous pearl earrings as she eagerly looks out a window, presumably expecting a male visitor. "A musical courtship is suggested by the viola da gamba on the floor in the foreground and by the flow of songbooks across the tabletop and onto the floor," according to a web page about the work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. The tuning of a lute was recognized by contemporary viewers as a symbol of the virtue of temperance. The
oil on canvas Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest o ...
work is 20¼ inches high and 18 inches wide (51.4 × 45.7 cm). The painting's canvas was almost certainly cut from the same bolt as that used for ''
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid ''Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid'' ( nl, Schrijvende vrouw met dienstbode) is a painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in 1670–1671 and held in the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin. The work shows a middle-class ...
''. The work likely was painted shortly after '' Young Woman with a Water Pitcher'', and it shares with that painting its framing of the figure within rectangular motifs. But the painting has more muted tones, reflecting a shift in that direction by Vermeer in the mid- to late 1660s. At this time, Vermeer began using shadows and soft contours to further evoke an atmosphere of intimacy. "The impression of spatial recession and atmosphere is somewhat diminished by darkening with age of the objects in the foreground and by abrasion of the paint surface, mostly in the same area," according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art web page. The painting was given to the museum in 1900 by a bequest of railroad industrialist Collis P. Huntington.


See also

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List of paintings by Johannes Vermeer The following is a list of paintings by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). After two or three early history paintings, he concentrated almost entirely on genre works, typically interiors with one or two figures. His popul ...


References


Further reading

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External links


Web page about the painting
– Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Exhibition web page
Metropolitan Museum of Art
''The Milkmaid'' by Johannes Vermeer
exhibition catalog fully online as PDF from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on ''Woman with a Lute'' (cat. no. 8) {{DEFAULTSORT:Woman With A Lute 1660s paintings Musical instruments in art Genre paintings by Johannes Vermeer Paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Portraits of women Books in art Maps in art Cartography in the Dutch Republic Early modern Netherlandish cartography