Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) · About 1662
A young woman in a blue and yellow dress stands by a window, one hand on the casement and the other on a gilded pitcher that sits in a matching basin. She is not doing anything in particular, perhaps opening the window to water plants or freshen the room, and that is exactly the point. Vermeer takes a moment so ordinary it would never have been painted before and fills it with light. The white linen of her headdress glows, the map on the back wall hangs in soft shadow, and the whole scene is held in a stillness that feels almost sacred.
Look at the way the light behaves. It comes through the leaded panes and falls across her face, but it also bounces: the blue of her dress reflects in the pitcher, the red of the tablecloth glows faintly in the basin, and the window frame throws a warm reflection onto her white hood. Vermeer built these effects with small touches of pure colour rather than blending, and the surface of the picture is astonishingly clean. The composition is a set of rectangles, window, map, table and chair, with the woman's curving figure the one soft form among them.
The painting was bought by Henry Marquand in 1887 and given to the Met in 1889, making it the first Vermeer to enter an American museum. There are only about thirty five paintings by Vermeer in the world, and the Met has five of them, the largest group anywhere. This is the one to start with, because it shows the artist at his most serene.
Did You Know? When the painting reached New York it was catalogued as a work by a different Dutch painter, because Vermeer was still barely known.
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