The Glass of Wine

Painted around 1659–1660, The Glass of Wine shows a seated young woman in a red satin gown lifting a glass to her lips while a standing gentleman, one hand resting on a wine jug, waits to refill it. She grips the glass by its stem, as the etiquette manuals of the day prescribed, and her face is largely hidden behind it, so that the encounter stays poised and unreadable. Walter Liedtke called the picture one of Vermeer’s first fully mature works.

Wine, music, and courtship

The scene belongs to a new kind of Dutch genre painting concerned with the amorous relations of educated men and women among the urban well-to-do. A cittern and open songbooks lie on the Spanish chair at the left, implying that the couple has just been making music together, a conventional prelude to courtship. The man keeps his hat on, a mark of male authority in seventeenth-century Dutch custom, and his evident eagerness to keep the glass filled has been read as a gentle attempt to ply his companion with drink.

The figure of Temperance

Set into the leaded window is a coat of arms and a female figure holding a bridle and a set square, the attributes of Temperance, the virtue of moderation. Traditionally this has been taken as an ironic comment on the scene below, a reminder of restraint hung above a courtship that may be sliding toward excess. Recent scholarship is more cautious, noting that the arms belong to a Delft family living near Vermeer and that the window may instead mark a wedding or simply signal the household’s standing. The same window appears in his closely related Girl with a Wine Glass, which shares the tiled floor and a wine-drinking woman.

Space and surface

Vermeer pushes the figures back into the middle ground and lets an empty Spanish chair, with its lionhead finials and gilt-stamped leather, stand between them and the viewer, so that the people read as part of a carefully ordered interior rather than the other way round. The box-like recession and bright, architectural setting owe a debt to Pieter de Hooch, though Vermeer’s figures carry a quieter psychological charge. The woman’s gown is built up in vermilion glazed with red madder, and the wall behind her is tinged faintly blue with ultramarine, lending air to a dimly lit room. The wine jug in the gentleman’s hand had already appeared in Vermeer’s earlier A Maid Asleep.

From Delft to Berlin

The painting passed through a string of English collections, including the Hope family, before it was acquired in 1901 by the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, where it hangs today as inventory 912C.