A Gentleman Washing His Hands

A lost interior scene known only from a single line in an auction catalogue. It appeared as lot 5 in the 1696 Dissius salein Amsterdam, where it was listed as a picture “in which a gentleman is washing his hands, in a see-through room, with figures, artful and rare.” No surviving painting has been securely identified with this entry, and nothing of it remains but the words of the catalogue.

A puzzling subject

The motif is unusual for Dutch genre painting. Albert Blankert observed that no other surviving Dutch picture shows a gentleman washing his hands, and suggested the scene may have been intended as an allegory of spiritual cleansing rather than a simple domestic moment. The hand-washing gesture recalls Gerard ter Borch’s treatments of the same theme; Vermeer and Ter Borch were acquainted, having together witnessed a notarial document in Delft in 1653.

A “see-through” room

The catalogue’s phrase “see-through room” renders the Dutch doorsiende Kamer, the doorkijkje or vista through one space into another that several Delft painters favoured for its illusion of depth. Vermeer used the device elsewhere, in A Maid Asleep and The Love Letter, and it was explored by contemporaries such as Pieter de Hooch and Samuel van Hoogstraten.

From the Dissius sale into obscurity

Like most of the Vermeers in the sale, the picture had belonged to the Delft collectors Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt and passed by descent to Jacob Dissius, who had married their granddaughter Magdalena. When the collection was dispersed in Amsterdam on 16 May 1696, twenty-one works given to Vermeer were sold together. After that day the painting drops out of the record entirely and has never resurfaced.