Das Glas Wein

The museum dates the canvas to 1658 or 1660, the years in which Vermeer — born in Delft in 1632, dead there in 1675 — was turning from history subjects to the interiors on which his reputation rests. It records that he took up a stock theme of Dutch genre painting, a young woman drinking with a cavalier at the wine jug, and that his older Delft colleague Pieter de Hooch, whose first interiors of about 1658 the gallery credits with shaping Vermeer’s own, worked the same kind of scene; the museum also suggests the example of Gerard ter Borch, and notes that Vermeer returned to the motif in the Girl with a Wine Glass in Brunswick, where the encounter is far more explicit than here. The picture was bought in 1901 from the collection of Pelham Clinton Hope at Deepdene.