Light, poured

Nobody can say for certain whether she is opening the window or closing it. Her right hand is on the casement, her left on the handle of a pitcher, and Johannes Vermeer has stopped her exactly between the two gestures, at the moment when either is still possible. It is about the smallest suspense a painter ever bothered to build, and it holds for three and a half centuries.

Start with the linen. She wears a broad white head-covering and a collar that falls over her shoulders, and none of that white is white. Where the cloth turns away from the window it goes blue, then grey-violet, then a cool shadow that echoes the panes of leaded glass she is touching. The light arrives from the left, as it does in so many of his rooms, and Vermeer follows it across her face and down the wall until the plaster takes on the faint warmth of skin.

Then the metal, which matters more than it first appears. The pitcher and the basin under it are gilt silver, costly things, the sort of vessels a well-off Delft household kept for washing hands at table or for show. They catch the colours around them: the red of the carpet thrown over the table swims in the basin’s curve. Beside it sits a jewellery box, its lid raised and a blue ribbon trailing over the edge. A blue cloth lies heaped on a chair. On the back wall hangs a map of the Low Countries, mounted on a rod. Wealth is everywhere in the room, though it never raises its voice.

What is she going to do? Perhaps rinse her hands, or tip the basin out over the street, or simply let the morning in. The painting withholds the next second, and the withholding is the drama. Her eyes are lowered toward the street, or toward nothing; her lips are slightly parted. She is alone and seems entirely unaware that being alone in a picture is unusual.

Vermeer worked slowly and left few paintings, fewer than forty that survive. This one, painted around 1662, crossed the Atlantic in the 1880s and became the first of his works to enter an American collection. It is a small canvas, forty-six centimetres high, and most of it is daylight on a plaster wall.

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