Frau mit Laute

A young woman sits by a window tuning a lute, glancing out as if listening for someone. Vermeer painted her around 1662 in Delft. Music in his pictures usually hints at courtship, and the open songbooks and the viola on the floor suggest she is waiting for a partner to arrive for a duet. On the back wall hangs a map of Europe, the kind of thing a prosperous Dutch household would own with pride during the republic's great age of trade and seafaring. The canvas was almost certainly cut from the same bolt of cloth Vermeer used for another of his quiet interiors, a woman writing a letter with her maid.