Girl Interrupted at her Music

Around 1660 Vermeer was doing what he did in nearly every picture, staging a quiet room in Delft where something is just about to shift. A young woman sits with a sheet of music, a man leans in beside her, and the title says she has been interrupted, her attention pulled from the page to him. On the back wall hangs a small painting of Cupid holding up a card, which for Vermeer's contemporaries was a plain hint that love is the real subject here. There is a sad footnote to looking at it now. The picture has come down to us badly worn and heavily restored, and that Cupid was for a time painted over, so a fair amount of what you see is later hands rather than Vermeer's own. It has hung in the Frick in New York since 1901.