A Maid Asleep

A Maid Asleep (ca.1556-57)

Many of Vermeer's contemporaries also portrayed sleeping women and servents - for example here, in Dutch artist Gabriël Metsu's Two Men with a Sleeping Woman (ca 1655).

A similarly intimate depiction of a young woman (albeit this time of a much lower class), A Maid Asleep (ca. 1656-7) portrays just that: a young maid, drunk after drinking a glass of wine (the wine glass is just barely visible on the table in front of her) sleeps in a chair, her head propped up on her right hand, while in the background a mysterious door stands open. Although difficult to make out, a painting within the painting in the upper left portrays Cupid with his mask thrown aside.

Drunken servants were popular subjects in Dutch Art at the time, with similar paintings known by Pieter de Hooch and Gabriël Metsu.

X-ray scans indicate that Vermeer originally planned to include a man in the doorway, looking back at the maid. Although this would have made the sexual overtones of the piece more overt, in the end Vermeer gave the painting a more ambiguous meaning by including just the empty doorway.

The painting of Cupid dropping his mask is an allegory representing the transition into sleep, during which we discard the masks we wear every day and instead relax into the fantasies which dreams provide. By portraying the maid, drunk and asleep, alone in the near darkness of the room, and by including the allegorical painting of Cupid in the upper left hand corner, Vermeer once again creates an intimate portrait of a woman.