The seated young woman looks up from her exchange with the man standing over her as if the viewer of the painting has interrupted them. The man, meanwhile, remains engrossed in whatever it is they have been doing, both figures with their hands on a sheet of paper, perhaps musical notation like the sheet visible on the table; or is it, perhaps, a letter?

This kind of intriguing narrative is characteristic of Vermeer’s genre scenes. Music-making in seventeenth-century Dutch culture was associated with courtship, and this connection is seemingly reinforced in this picture by the painting of Cupid hanging on the shadowed wall behind the couple. On the table is what appears to be a cittern, a plucked string instrument, and a delicately painted glass of red wine. The silver lid of the blue and white ceramic ewer glints in the light streaming in from the window. The ewer has been identified by some scholars as a piece of Chinese porcelain (modified with a European-style silver lid) and by others as a piece of Delftware—that is, the ceramic craft produced in Vermeer’s Delft in direct imitation of the Chinese porcelains that had been imported into Europe for centuries. Vermeer imbues the scene with his characteristic luminosity and carefully observed details, like the lion heads carved on the chair by the window, their manes partially illuminated by the light.