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| Young Woman with a Lute |
A young woman glances out the window while tuning the harp.
Open a songbook and viola da gamba on the floor indicates that he is preparing a duet.
Rich young people in the Netherlands study music as part of their education, and amateur concerts provide a good opportunity to seduce.
The European map in the background reflects the contemporary décor of Dutch homes, a sign of pride in the nation's excellence in navigation and cartography.
Catalogue Entry
The Painting:
A young woman sits at a window, tuning a lute. With her ear cocked toward the pegbox, she strums the instrument while fixing her gaze on the window and the street beyond.
The light falling into the room through the panes of leaded glass picks out the glint of pearls at the woman’s ear and throat, as well as the polished brass studs in the chair beside her.
Songbooks lie strewn on the table at which she sits. Another book has tumbled to the marble floor, where it lies next to a viola da gamba. At the rear of the room, a hand-colored map of Europe hangs against the otherwise bare white wall. Someone has pushed a chair with heavy carved finials away from the table.
This picture occupies a midpoint in Vermeer’s evolution as he step-by-step mastered the convincing depiction of architectural space.
[1] In his earliest paintings, devoted to biblical or mythological subjects, bulky figures jostle against the picture plane, the ground on which they stand appearing to tilt up toward the viewer.
In the genre scenes that followed, Vermeer developed compositions based around the half-length figure, anchored in space by a table that juts out of the lower left-hand corner. In Young Woman with a Lute, the perspectival recession of chair and table offers a bridge into the painting, initiating the eye’s strong diagonal movement across the canvas.
Taking in the picture at a glance, we focus on the musician herself as the radiant fulcrum between the chair and the map.
As in so many of Vermeer’s paintings, illumination here takes the form of a window on the left that suffuses the middle ground in soft light while leaving the foreground in relative darkness.
With few means of artificial illumination at their disposal, seventeenth-century painters manipulated windows and shutters to control the fall of light in their studios.
In the narrow row houses so typical of Dutch cities both in the seventeenth century and today, it was the voorhuis, or street-facing room, that enjoyed the best light.
Martha Hollander has defined the voorhuis as “simultaneously public and private; it was a gateway to the deeper interior, the upstairs rooms, and the street.”[2] Vermeer’s lute player, like most of his women, occupies this liminal space.
The artist heightened this liminality by focusing the lutenist’s gaze and the torsion of her body outward, toward the window and the street.
The act of tuning her instrument and the viola da gamba on the floor have suggested to most commentators that this young woman anticipates a duet.
But the scattered songbooks and nonchalant abandonment of the man’s instrument could equally suggest an encounter already completed.
The woman may have her eyes on the back of a departing suitor, as her fingers restore the harmony that a recent performance has brought out of tune.
Art and Music:
The musical scenes of Dutch art existed alongside a vibrant musical culture in daily life.
[3] Instrumental skill was an expected accomplishment of well-brought up young men and women.
Within this culture of amateur performance, the lute occupied a privileged position as the vehicle of soloists and the instrument most often depicted in the visual arts.
[4] Lutes were themselves luxury items generally imported, at significant costs, from Italy or the German-speaking lands.
The songbooks that the lutenist neglects in her reverie also held an important place in seventeenth-century Dutch culture.
[5] They ranged across a spectrum from cheap and disposable productions to luxurious creations of the finest artists and printmakers.
Vermeer’s depiction of the songbooks in The Met's painting is not detailed enough to allow us to identify them with specific publications, but they do display the songbook’s typical oblong format, allowing multiple singers or instrumentalists to share the same score.
Because of their association with duets and their frequently amorous content, songbooks often served as lovers’ gifts in seventeenth-century Holland.
Even as they are ignored by Vermeer’s lutenist, the songbooks further serve to situate her in an atmosphere of erotic anticipation or recollection.
The Pearls, Carpet, and Map: Young Woman with a Lute falls within the category of Vermeer’s so-called “pearl pictures,” a term first coined by Lawrence Gowing.
[6] This designation refers most obviously to the prominent inclusion of pearl necklaces and earrings, but also to a pearlescent coloration more generally. In these works, Vermeer shifted toward a smoother surface and away from the almost pointillist application of dots of paint to capture the effect of light.
Within the generally somber palette of the darkened and abraded Met picture, the pearls at the lutenist’s ear and throat stand out, further establishing her as the cynosure of the painting. The artist reinforced the pearls’ luminosity with the visual rhyme of the gleaming brass studs in the chair on the left.
Dutch seventeenth-century paintings very frequently include Islamic or East Asian textiles, reminders of the networks that linked cities like Delft to centers of trade around the world. One such signpost to the outer world is the carpet draping the table at which the lute player sits.
The textile in Young Woman with a Lute is unfortunately difficult to identify, as this portion of the painting is highly abraded and discolored, distorting its original appearance. The remaining traces of dark blue pigment suggest a pattern of horizontal stripes, while the stiff draping has caused the carpet specialist Walter Denny to speculate that it may represent a Persian or Indian carpet.
[7] More easily identified is the map that dominates the background of the picture, first printed around 1613 by Jodocus Hondius and subsequently reissued in 1659 by Joan Blaeu.
[8] The map adds a cosmopolitan note to Vermeer’s domestic scene. Like the window at which his lutenist stares, it gestures toward the world waiting outside the confines of the house.
Afterlife: Attempts have been made to identify The Met's picture with inventory and auction records describing Vermeer paintings of young female musicians.
But the work first surfaces with certainty in the historical record when the American railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington acquired it on the Paris art market in the late nineteenth century for two thousand francs, subsequently bequeathing it to The Met upon his death in 1900.
[9] (The work was formally accessioned, however, only following the death of his widow in 1924.) Young Woman with a Lute provided a highlight of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton exhibition, held at The Met to commemorate the tricentennial of Henry Hudson’s navigation of the river that now bears his name.
A critic who saw the painting then described it as “that pearl of price, a perfect work…of the most perfect painter that ever lived.”[10]
Adam Eaker 2018
[1] For an introduction to Vermeer’s artistic development, see Walter Liedtke, “Vermeer Teaching Himself,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer, ed. Wayne E. Franits, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 27–40.
[2] Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Berkeley, 2002, p. 184.
[3] Marjorie E. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, London, 2013.
[4] Jan W. J. Burgers, The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age: Musical Culture in the Netherlands, 1580–1670, Amsterdam, 2013.
[5] Natascha Veldhorst, Zingend door het leven: Het Nederlandse liedboek in de Gouden Eeuw, Amsterdam, 2009.
[6] Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, 2nd ed., New York, 1972, pp. 42–44.
[7] Personal communication to the author, August 28, 2016.
[8] See Welu 1975, p. 535.
[9] For the painting’s provenance, see Liedtke 2007.
[10] See Cox 1910.
Provenance
Herman Stoffelsz van Swoll, Amsterdam (until d. 1698; his estate sale, Amsterdam, April 22, 1699, no. 25, for fl. 400); sale, Amsterdam, July 13, 1718, no. 8, for fl. 500; sale, Amsterdam, April 19, 1735, no. 11, for fl. 53
[David Ietswart, until 1749; sale, Amsterdam, April 22, 1749, no. 152, for fl. 70 to Ravensberg]; private collection, Austria (in 1824)
Dmitri Shchukin, Moscow (1899); [Wächtler, Berlin, 1899; sold for 700 marks to Bredius]
Abraham Bredius, The Hague (1899–1928, on loan to Mauritshuis, The Haugue, 1899–1923, and to Museum Boymans, Rotterdam, 1923–28; sold to Kleinberger); [Kleinberger, Paris, 1928; sold to Friedsam]; Michael Friedsam, New York (1928–d. 1931)
Artist:
Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632–1675 Delft)
Date:
ca. 1662-63
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
20 1/4 x 18 in. (51.4 x 45.7 cm)
Classification:
Paintings
Credit Line:
Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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