Woman Holding a Balance

Woman Holding a Balance. West Building, main floor, in the Dutch galleries.

Get close first, because this one is small. Seventeen inches by fifteen, oil on canvas, about the size of a laptop lid. There are only around thirty-five paintings by Johannes Vermeer in the world and four of them are in this building, so people arrive at this wall expecting something monumental and walk straight past it.

Now the one thing to actually do here. Look at the two pans hanging from the balance in her right hand. They are empty.

For most of three centuries this picture was called Woman Weighing Gold, and after that Woman Weighing Pearls, and most people standing where you are standing still believe that is what is happening. Microscopic examination of those pans settled it. There is nothing in either one. She is holding the scale up and waiting for it to stop swinging.

The gold is on the table in front of her. An open box, pearls spilling out of it, chains lying loose beside them. She is not touching any of it and she is not looking at it.

Now look over her shoulder at the dark picture on the back wall. That is a Last Judgment, the souls being sorted at the end of the world, and her head sits directly beneath the figure of Christ at the center of it. So you have a woman weighing nothing, framed inside the weighing of everything. That is the picture. Whatever she is measuring is not on the table.

Two smaller things most people miss. There is a mirror on the wall in front of her, at the window, turned toward her face. And the window itself is covered by that orange curtain except for a strip at the top, which is why the light lands in one narrow band across her forehead, her collar, and the near pan of the balance, and why everything else in the room goes soft.

You will hear a guide say she is pregnant. Look at the padded jacket rather than the shape. Dutch fashion in the 1660s built out the front of a woman's jacket exactly like that, and the specialists on seventeenth century Dutch clothing say the silhouette is the coat, not a pregnancy. Nobody can prove it either way. It is a good example of what a costume historian can settle that an art historian cannot.

The Gallery dates it to about 1664. Its first recorded sale was in Amsterdam on the sixteenth of May, 1696, when the pictures from Jacob Dissius's estate went under the hammer and this one brought 155 guilders, one of the stronger prices in a room that was selling Vermeers to a market that had largely forgotten him. It came here in 1942 with the Widener Collection.

Stand back four or five steps before you leave, far enough that the pearls stop reading as objects. From there the light does something a photograph will never do for you. It picks out three or four things in a dark room, one of which is an empty pan on the end of a chain, and leaves you to decide what she is doing.