8/23/2023 0 Comments Wine glass painting on canvasHe may be thought to have intoned a love song, perhaps like one of Hooft's, whose lyrics in the tradition of Petrarch and De Ronsard were often set to musical accompaniment. Vermeer painted several variations on the theme of temperance, or moderation, from The Glass of Wine onward, perhaps the most inventive being the Woman with a Balance.Ī preceding music making, presumably for the purpose of wooing, is hinted at by the songbooks on the table and by the cittern on the chair, which we may assume to have been used by the gentleman to serenade the young woman. The same window occurs in Young Woman with a Wineglass, where its placement and stronger colors establish a comparison with the inexperienced wine taster. She is Temperance, swathed in a cascade of drapery like the allegorical figures on William the Silent's tomb. 1) holds a bridle forward like a bit of advice. The figure in the stained-glass window (fig. A chair in the foreground, supporting a cittern, suggests the suitor's advance from another flank. The woman's pose is restrained and angular, as if her sip of wine fills an awkward pause in the conversation. The placement of that portentous motif within the composition seems perfectly natural and at the same time calculated to a degree the framing of the jug within the linen nimbus of the man's cuff amplifies its significance. Confidence can be sensed in the carriage of the man's head and shoulders (which are covered, as if he had just arrived) and in his grip on the jug. The folds of the green cloak, one of Vermeer's most impressive passages of drapery, seem to trace the recent motion of the jug of wine. 4) in the Glass of Wine, unlike his counterpart in The Music Lesson, is cast in a dominant, not a captive, role the woman's position seems very much subordinate to his own (compare Christ and Mary). The comparison reveals how closely Vermeer considered postures and gestures, the subtleties of which he must have admired in works by Ter Borch. The man's close proximity to the woman in that picture suggests a tension similar to that of the couple in the present painting, although its precise nature is not the same. Van Ruijven evidently owned The Music Lesson (fig. Thus the idea, first raised in connection with A Maid Asleep and The Milkmaid, that Van Ruijven at least encouraged Vermeer's interest in fashionable subjects also seems appropriate to the scenes of modern manners dating from about 1658 onward. Young Woman Interrupted at Music cannot be traced before 1810, but Young Woman with a Wineglass, a work reminiscent of Van Mieris's in aspects of its style and especially in expression, is probably the "merry company in a room" listed in the Dissius sale of 1696 (and later more fully described), that is, a picture first acquired by Vermeer's most important patron from about 1657 onward, Pieter van Ruijven. The present work was first recorded in the 1736 sale of Jan van Loon's collection in Delft. Vermeer was about twenty-seven years old when he painted this picture, and had reason to feel that his work had begun to rival that of Ter Borch or Frans van Mieris in quality and, at least in his own city, recognition. Here the artist has clearly mastered a visual language, which despite slips in syntax (as in the recession of floor tiles on the right) is employed with remarkable facility and grace. Despite the parallel with De Hooch's designs and less obvious similarities with pictures by other artists, especially Gerrit ter Borch, this canvas and the Vermeer's of about 1659–1660 cited above no longer convey the impression (as does, for example, Cavalier and Young Woman of about 1657) of depending upon two or three principal sources. No analysis of artistic conventions can suggest the sheer beauty and extraordinary refinement of a painting like The Glass of Wine, which may be considered one of Vermeer's first fully mature works. Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz,
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