A Arte da Pintura

Vermeer kept this painting his whole life and never sold it, even when his family was deep in debt. You can see why he prized it. A painter sits with his back to us, brush raised, at work on a model dressed as Clio, the muse of history, with her laurel wreath and trumpet. The map of the old Netherlands on the back wall shows the country before it split in the war with Spain, so the whole room is really about painting outlasting the moment it records. Its later story turned dark. In 1940 the painting was sold to Adolf Hitler, who wanted it for a vast museum he planned in Linz, near where he was born. American forces recovered it after the war and it passed to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where the map, the muse and the turned-away painter are still doing exactly what Vermeer set them to do.