Recent research by the scientific team at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows that Vermeer overpainted a figure set within the painting A Maid Asleep (1656-57), in the background of the composition. It represented a man with his left arm raised, suggesting that he was an artist working by an easel.
The man appears to be painting with his left hand, so he is probably reflected in a framed mirror (rather than depicted in a portrait hanging on a wall). He therefore presumably represents a self-portrait of Vermeer. Unfortunately, the image is too indistinct to see his facial features.
Further evidence for believing it is a self-portrait has been provided to the Met Museum team by The Art Newspaper, which pointed to a similar example in a Dutch painting of the period: Nicolaes Maes’s The Naughty Drummer (Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, around 1655), which was completed just a year or so before the Vermeer.
Don’t wake the baby!
Maes depicts a mother scolding her young son, whose noisy drumming is waking up the sleeping infant. Hanging on the wall, just above the mother, is what appears to be a framed mirror, which again shows an artist at their easel, presumably a self-portrait of Maes. It is almost certain that Vermeer knew Maes’s work, and he may well have seen The Naughty Drummer.
Above the woman’s head in The Naughty Drummer (around 1655), by a contemporary of Vermeer’s, Nicolaes Maes, is a mirror, which is believed to show Maes at his easel
© Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
In A Maid Asleep, Vermeer eventually overpainted the artist reflected in the mirror. Instead, he added what appears to be a smaller mirror with no visible reflection, along with a table and the edge of a window. One can only speculate on the reason for the change, but Vermeer may well have wanted to focus more attention on the woman, without the distraction of the reflected man.
A model, not a maidservant
In 2023 the Met Museum had argued that Vermeer’s painted-over figure might have been a self-portrait, and the latest research now strengthens this theory. This intriguing conclusion suggests that the woman dozing at the table is not a maid, but a model. Further evidence for this is her dress and pearl earrings, which hardly seem to be those of a servant.
The Met Museum’s scientific team proposes in the Rijksmuseum’s recent publication Closer to Vermeer that she is “the artist’s sumptuously adorned model, exhausted from posing or drinking”. If so, the traditional title of the painting (dating back to 1696) is misleading. It might be more appropriate to entitle Vermeer’s painting The Sleeping Model.
