Frau mit Wasserkrug

Vermeer painted this around 1662, in the middle of the single most prosperous decade the Dutch Republic ever had. Amsterdam was the richest city in Europe, trading everything from Baltic grain to porcelain, and the calm you feel in this small room is partly the calm of a country that had money and quiet at the same time. A woman stands at a window, one hand on the frame, the other on a gilded water jug. She is caught in an ordinary moment, opening the shutter, before she steps into the day. Vermeer built the whole picture out of light rather than story. Look at the white linen cap and collar, how the light passes through them and turns faintly blue where it meets the wall. He was moving away from clever perspective tricks toward this, the plain fall of daylight on cloth and metal. There is a Turkish carpet on the table and a map on the wall, both signs of a trading nation that reached far beyond its borders. This was the first Vermeer ever to reach America. A New York collector named Henry Marquand bought it in Paris in 1887 for a few hundred dollars and gave it to this museum, at a time when most Americans had never seen the painter's name.