Johannes Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid : new discoveries cast light on changes to the composition and the discoloration of some paint passages

Among the thirty-six paintings ascribed to the Dutch seventeenth century artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Mistress and Maid, in The Frick Collection, stands out for the large-scale figures set against a rather plain background depicting a barely discernible curtain. Although generally accepted as among the late works of the artist and dated to 1667–1668, for decades scholars have continued to puzzle over aspects of this portrayal. When the painting was cleaned and restored in 1952, attempts to understand the seeming lack of finish and simplified composition were hampered by the limited technical means available at that time. In 1968, Hermann Kuhn included Mistress and Maid in his groundbreaking technical investigation ‘A Study of the Pigments and the Grounds Used by Jan Vermeer.’ In the present study, imaging by infrared reflectography and macro-X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) revealed significant compositional changes and drew focus to areas of suspected color change. Three of the samples taken by Hermann Kuhn, and now in the archive of the Doerner Institut in Munich, were re-analyzed, along with a few paint samples taken from areas not examined in the 1968 study, using scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS) and Raman spectroscopy. These analyses made it possible to further visualize detailed compositional elements in the background of the painting that were later painted out, and to characterize darkening and color changes in different paint passages.