A Maid Asleep

Vermeer painted A Maid Asleep around 1656 or 1657, at the very beginning of the mature period that would produce his great interior scenes. He was about 24 years old and had just begun to paint the quiet, light-filled rooms that would define his career. This is one of the first. A young woman sits at a table, her head resting on her arm, asleep. Behind her, a window lets in soft afternoon light. A rug is draped over the table, and a glass wine jug sits near her elbow. A door at the left opens into another room, where a picture hangs on the far wall. The composition is simple and frontal, with the figure placed slightly off-center. The painting is often described as a transitional work. Vermeer had spent the previous five years painting religious and mythological subjects on a larger scale, with limited success. Around 1656, he shifted to domestic interiors with single figures, a subject that suited his temperament and his market. A Maid Asleep is one of the earliest examples. The handling is looser and less polished than the Vermeers of the 1660s: the rug is painted in broad, summary strokes, and the figure's face is less defined than it would become. The subject of a sleeping maid had a specific meaning in 17th-century Dutch genre painting. It was a moral warning about idleness and the dangers of drink. The wine jug on the table is the clue. But Vermeer treats the subject without the heavy-handed moralizing of his contemporaries. There is no satirical inscription, no disapproving figure in the background. The painting simply shows a woman who has fallen asleep at the table, and the light does the rest. Oil on canvas, 87 by 76 centimeters. Vermeer used a warm, muted palette of browns, ochres, and dull reds, with a single note of bright blue in the maid's apron. The window is the same leaded-glass window that appears in nearly all his interiors, painted from the same studio in his mother-in-law's house on Oude Langendijk in Delft. The near-square format and warm tones make this print versatile. It works in a bedroom, a study, or a hallway with low light. The subject of sleep suits private spaces rather than public ones. The 11x14 or 16x20 framed version is a good size for most walls. The painting rewards close viewing, so hang it where someone can stand within arm's reach. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1913, bequeathed by Benjamin Altman. Altman was a department store magnate who assembled one of the finest private collections of Dutch painting in America and left it to the Met. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.