The Girl with the Wine Glass

Vermeer's The Girl with the Wine Glass from around 1659-60, in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, depicts a woman accepting wine from a smiling gentleman while a second man sits dejectedly at the table. The stained-glass window depicting Temperance provides ironic commentary on the seduction scene below. The painting belongs to Vermeer's early-mature period, when he was developing the luminous interior technique that would define his art while still working with the social genre subjects popular in Dutch painting.

Vermeer renders the stained-glass window with remarkable precision, its colored light casting warm tones across the woman's red dress and the white wall. The cool, clear spatial construction and the careful handling of multiple light sources demonstrate his developing mastery of interior illumination.