Here, Vermeer presents a light-filled scene of a young woman conversing at a table with an officer in a wide-brimmed hat. Like so many of Vermeer’s interior scenes, it may have been painted in the artist’s second-floor studio in his home in Delft. The resemblance of this woman to several other figures in Vermeer’s paintings has led some to suggest that she may be his wife, Catharina Bolnes, serving as a convenient, if also beloved, model. What exactly is taking place in the picture is uncertain; scholars have proposed a range of interpretations of the couple’s exchange, from delightful courtship to a transactional encounter between a prostitute and her client—both scenarios were common in Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century.

The chairs with carved lion heads may be familiar from Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music, also in the Frick’s collection. In this painting, the woman’s glass is of a type used for white wine. The artist renders the wall map behind the couple with such clarity that it can be identified: it is a map of Holland and Westfriesland, pictured with a west-up orientation, in which the blue areas indicate land, not water; these blue areas were probably originally green, before a yellow pigment faded over the centuries.

The map evokes the great age of Dutch exploration and commerce during Vermeer’s life, as does the man’s beaver-felt hat. Beaver was the preferred animal pelt from which to make men’s hats in this period, and it was hunted to extinction in northern Europe. Huge volumes of beaver pelts were imported into Europe from North America, through colonial trade with Indigenous communities. Modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized the toll on human life of this and many aspects of global trade in the seventeenth century. The degree to which Vermeer was concerned with the events taking place oceans away from his second-floor studio in Delft is unknown. In this painting, he seems to have been chiefly occupied with conveying touches of light, with the sparkle of this woman’s smile, with the broad silhouette of the swashbuckling officer.