Johannes Vermeer, A Girl Asleep, 1656–1657, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Museum’s website (public domain). Detail.
Johannes Vermeer was a master of ambiguity. His silent and calm interiors, and beautiful Dutch women, although innocent at first glance, seem to be hiding more than one secret. Let’s meet Vermeer‘s desperate housewives!
This woman has had too much to drink. As a result, is she asleep or maybe just daydreaming about her date? A visitor must have just left as you can see an empty chair, a jug, and two wine glasses on the table. Radiographs show that in the first version of the painting, there was a gentleman in the doorway and a dog to the lower right. But Vermeer decided to erase them. Instead, the woman is left alone and the whole painting is made more mysterious.
Jewellery usually makes women feel good. However, this woman doesn’t really seem happy. Her gestures and facial expression seem to show helplessness or resignation. Is the necklace a gift from a lover? Is she putting it on or taking it off? The ambiguous title does not help us understand. We can only wonder what she really sees in her reflection in the small mirror.
This woman seems to be genuinely annoyed. This guy has just come in, perhaps to do some mansplaining about her music. Or he is trying to woo her by showing off how well he can read the musical notes? The girl’s face seems to be saying: “Oh no, it’s him again. How long can it last?” The full wine glass on the table suggests that it will take a while since, in the symbolic language of painting, an untouched glass of wine meant a slowly progressing relationship between a woman and a man.
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Magda, art historian and Italianist, she writes about art because she cannot make it herself. She loves committed and political artists like Ai Weiwei or the Futurists; like Joseph Beuys she believes that art can change us and we can change the world.
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