レースを編む女

This is the smallest painting Vermeer ever made, about the size of a sheet of paper, done around 1669 in the Dutch town of Delft. A young woman bends close over her lacework, pinning bobbins in place, and Vermeer builds the whole picture around that concentration. The threads spilling from the cushion in the foreground dissolve into soft blurs of red and white, while her hands stay in sharp focus, as if the painter looked exactly where she is looking. Two hundred years later Van Gogh wrote to a friend about the beauty of its colors. And Salvador Dalí became so fixated on it that in 1955 he got permission to set up his easel in the Louvre and paint his own version in front of the original.