La alcahueta

Vermeer signed and dated this 1656, when he was 24, and he almost never signed anything, so the date in the lower corner is a small event in itself. This is his first real scene of everyday life, and it's a blunt one. A soldier in a red coat drops a coin into the open hand of a young woman in yellow while an older woman in black looks on, running the transaction. It's a brothel scene, plainly told. Off to the left a grinning man raises a glass toward us and holds a stringed instrument, and many people believe that face is Vermeer himself, putting his own portrait into the room. What you don't yet see much of is the quiet, sunlit Vermeer everyone knows. Here he's still loud, crowded, close up. The signature only came to light in 1859, when a French critic examining the canvas in Dresden noticed it.