#60 A Maid Asleep — Coaster

X-rays have shown what Vermeer took out. There was a man standing in the doorway behind her, and a dog in the foreground, and he painted over both, leaving an empty room and a woman asleep at a table with a wine jug. Removing the man removed the story: without him she is simply tired, and with him she is something else entirely. It is one of the first pictures where he chose silence over incident. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.