Woman Holding a Balance

Johannes Vermeer

Woman Holding a Balance offers a superb example of Johannes Vermeer’s exquisite sense of order and rhythm. A woman dressed in a blue jacket with fur trim stands serenely at a table in a corner of a room. The jeweler’s balance in her right hand rests at equilibrium. A large painting of the Last Judgment, framed in black, hangs on the back wall of the room. A shimmering blue cloth and an open jewelry box with two strands of pearls and a gold chain lie on the sturdy table. Soft light coming through the window illuminates the scene. The woman’s deep introspection causes the viewer momentary hesitation about intruding on this private, contemplative moment.

The woman’s gaze at the balance, when considered in the context of the Last Judgment on the wall behind her, suggests that Vermeer, a Catholic, sought to infuse this work with religious and spiritual significance. Saint Ignatius of Loyola instructed the faithful to examine their consciences and weigh their sins as if facing Judgment Day. Only such deliberation could lead to virtuous choices along the path of life. Poised between the earthly treasures of gold and pearls before her and Last Judgment painting’s stark reminder of the eternal consequences of her actions, this woman personifies the values of materialism and morality that jostled for dominance in 17th-century Dutch society.

The painting’s subtext is reinforced by Vermeer’s refined composition and lighting. For example, the delicate hand holding the balance is placed directly in front of the frame’s dark corner, while the scales are set off against the bare plaster wall—an effect that Vermeer created by manipulating reality. Note that the bottom of the Last Judgment’s frame is slightly higher to the left of the woman than it is behind her back.

Related Works by Vermeer in the Collection

Shown from about the knees up, a pale, smooth-skinned woman in a fur-lined yellow jacket looks out at us as she sits writing at a table in this vertical painting. The woman’s body faces the table to our left. She turns her head to gaze at us from the corners of her dark gray eyes under faint brows. She has a wide nose, and her pale lips are closed. Her light brown hair is pulled back and held in place with white bows, and gleaming teardrop-shaped pearl earrings dangle from her ears. Her lemon-yellow jacket is trimmed with ermine fur, which is white with black speckles, at the cuffs and down the front opening. A full, elephant-gray skirt falls to the floor beneath the jacket. Both hands rest on the table, and she holds a quill in her right hand, farther from us, on a piece of paper. She leans forward in her wooden chair. The back panel of the chair is covered in black fabric and lined with brass studs. Two gilded finials, carved into lions’ heads, face the woman’s back with mouths open. The table is covered with a celestial-blue cloth crumpled near the left edge of the canvas. On the table are a strand of pearls, a pale yellow ribbon, and a black box with three brown panels studded with pearls around silver keyholes. Two pewter gray vessels are visible just beyond it, in front of a second chair, which faces us. On the putty-gray wall behind the woman, a framed painting hangs in the upper left quadrant of the composition. The painting-within-the painting is done in muted tones of brown and shows a cello and other unidentifiable objects. — Johannes Vermeer, *A Lady Writing*, c. 1665, oil on canvas, Gift of Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., in memory of their father, Horace Havemeyer, 1962.10.1

Shown from the waist up, a young woman sits on the other side of the edge of a table, leaning toward us on one elbow in this vertical painting. She looks at us with dark brown eyes under faint, arched brows. She has pale skin with flushed cheeks, a long, rounded nose, and her ruby-red lips are parted. Her brown hair is tucked into a wide, conical hat with gray, pale yellow, and ash-brown vertical stripes. Light falls across her face from our right, so the hat casts a shadow over her eyes and on the far cheek, to our left. Light glints off of two teardrop-shaped pearl earrings. Her muted blue bodice has a few touches of topaz and sky blue create a brocade-like floral pattern. The bodice is trimmed with a wide band of white fur down the front and around the cuffs, which come down just beyond her elbows. A white kerchief tucked into the bodice covers her shoulders. She leans onto her left forearm, to our right, and that arm is close and parallel to the bottom edge of the composition. In that hand she holds a golden flute like a pencil, and her other hand rests against the edge of the table. She leans to our right so we can see the gold lion's head finial at the top of her wooden chair. The area behind her is painted with patches of harvest yellow, fawn brown, muted brick red, and parchment white to create a loosely patterned drapery that fills the background. — Studio of Johannes Vermeer, *Girl with a Flute*, c. 1669/1675, oil on panel, Widener Collection, 1942.9.98

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, c. 1669, oil on panel, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.53

About the Artist

Johannes Vermeer, The Procuress (De koppelaarster), 1656 . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen  Alte Meister (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister), Dresden.

It is possible that the young man pictured at the left could be Vermeer’s self-portrait, although there has been no written evidence to confirm it. The artist would have been 24 at the time.

Johannes Vermeer is today one of the most famous European artists of all time. He was born and died in the city of Delft, with which he is strongly associated. His father Reynier was a weaver of fine cloth, which provided the family a comfortable living. In 1631, the year before Johannes was born, his father joined the St. Luke's Guild as a picture dealer.

No records document Vermeer’s early artistic training and apprenticeship—neither where nor with whom he trained. In 1653 he registered as a master painter with the St. Luke’s Guild and had inherited Reynier’s art-dealing business the previous year. In April 1653 he married a Catholic, Catharina Bolnes, whose mother, Maria Thins, exerted significant influence over the couple’s lives. She is likely to have required Vermeer, born a Reformed Protestant, to convert to Catholicism. Johannes and Catharina eventually moved into Maria’s house.

Vermeer’s early ambition was to become a history painter. By the mid-1650s, however, he had turned to domestic scenes and had begun to express his interest in various techniques and devices that could aid him in creating lifelike effects. For example, he seems to have used the camera obscura, a pinhole device used to project an image onto a wall surface with a lens. The device exaggerated spatial effects, and the projected image was probably not sharply focused. Vermeer often incorporated blurred effects in his work, similar to those created by the camera obscura.

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Johannes Vermeer

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Dutch Painting in the Golden Age

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Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

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Johannes Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance

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Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.97

Vermeer’s oeuvre was small; only about 35 authentic paintings are known today. He was respected in artistic circles and elected headman of the Delft artists’ guild on several occasions. Nonetheless, in later years, he struggled financially, raising 11 children and also coping with the economic downturn in the 1670s after France invaded the Netherlands.

After Vermeer’s death at 43, his wife was forced to declare bankruptcy, and the works in her possession were auctioned. The artist’s name was largely forgotten until the late 19th century—so much so that the iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague) was sold for only two guilders and 30 cents in 1882.

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