Young Woman in an Interior

A girl sits chin in hand on a ladderback chair at the far end of a long, plain room, gazing toward an open Dutch door through which warm light pours, while a woman lies in the shadowy, curtained bed behind her — a scene without narrative but filled with a quiet sense of mystery. Jacobus Vrel, about whom almost nothing is known, not even where he worked, gave his interiors an unpretentious clarity, and his earliest dated paintings predate both Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, whose intimate domestic scenes his work recalls and with whom it has sometimes been confused; he developed his manner independently of them. The panel belonged to the great connoisseur Frits Lugt before entering the J. Paul Getty Museum, which deaccessioned it in 2007, and June deH. and Henry H. Weldon gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 2012. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.