The Glass of Wine

Illuminated by cool daylight entering through two windows, mainly through the front one, a young woman sits at a table and drinks wine. She presses the glass to her face to empty it completely, as if she wanted to avoid the expectant look of the elegant cavalier, who stands with the jug in his hand but no glass of his own, ready to pour more wine. An amorous relationship of a dubious nature has been initiated. Nevertheless, the events are not imbued with anything crude or superficially erotic.
On the chair and table, a cittern and sheets of music have been set aside, a possible reference to the couple having made music together. Here, Vermeer transforms a common subject of Dutch genre painters. He may have been inspired by his colleague Gerard Ter Borch, who also painted the motif of a cavaliers who watches a lady drinking, his hand on the bottle. Whereas the gentleman in Ter Borch’s painting has laid his arm around the lady’s shoulder, Vermeer provides no explicit clue to the nature of the couple’s relationship. It remains unclear whether the enjoyment of alcohol will end in debauchery.
On the left, on a slightly open window with a colourful coat of arms, the figure of a woman with interlacing straps in her hand can be discerned. A figure of this kind is among the emblems that G. Rollenhagen published in 1617. Here the straps prove to be harnesses, which alongside the set square are an attribute of “La Temperantia” (temperance). The text that accompanies the emblem is “Mens Servare Modum, rebus sufflata secundis, / Nescit, et affectus fraena tenere sui.” (The heart knows not how to maintain moderation and rein in the feelings when it is touched by a breath of fortune.) This statement relates not only to drinking the wine, but in general to the relationship between the two persons depicted and their foreseeable lack of restraint. It is a warning to “maintain moderation”. In a second work, Vermeer applied a depiction of this emblem to the same context. In the painting Girl with a Wine Glass (Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) the indecent advances of the gentleman are emphasised much more explicitly, however.
In this work in Berlin, the close-up view is abandoned for the first time. Vermeer makes viewers stand back, separating them by means of the unoccupied chair at the table. The distance thus gained widens the angle of view. The interior is no longer perceived as part of an excerpt of figures, but rather the figures are now part of this excerpt from the interior. Innovations of this kind point to the influence of the first masterpieces by Pieter de Hooch, a painter colleague of Vermeer from Delft who was three years older. De Hooch’s interiors of around 1658 are primarily conceived and designed starting from the interior architecture. What Vermeer, however, was able to achieve with an interior of the type painted by de Hooch is demonstrated particularly by this painting. The Berlin work is impressive in its austerely calculated structure and also in the illusionistic manner of painting, which is retained even
in the differentiation of surface characteristics but without being reduced to this purely item-related purpose. In the ubiquitous light, objects take on the appearance of possessing a higher quality. Jan Kelch, Katja Kleinert | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019