Jacob Vrel, The Little Min

by Atelier Liesjes

In the centre of a large, austere Dutch room sits a woman on a wicker chair, her chin resting in her hand, her gaze fixed straight ahead. She is wearing a brown bodice and a wide, grey-blue skirt that falls to the red floor tiles. Behind her yawns the dark opening of a box bed with green curtains; inside, a young woman in a white bonnet and apron is leaning over the bedding, her hands outstretched towards whatever lies there. On the right, a fireplace dominates the scene, with a tiled mantelpiece, a brass kettle and a pair of red slippers on the floor. On the left, daylight streams in through a window with wooden shutters; a brass basin hangs on the wall, and a row of gleaming white plates stands on the mantelpiece. The ceiling beams are dark brown, the walls ivory white and ochre yellow. In the background, the box bed is almost a second room: the dark green cloth has been pushed aside and the bedding is piled high. Vrel constructs the room using simple means: a few pieces of furniture, a doorway, a window. Yet the space is anything but empty. The cool light from the left gently contrasts with the warm tones of wood, copper and baked brick, and it is precisely this contrast that lends the scene its intimacy. The style is that of the seventeenth-century Delft interior, akin to the work of Pieter de Hooch: a genre piece without a narrative, in which waiting and musing are more important than action. Jacob Vrel worked in Delft around the mid-seventeenth century and is regarded as one of the earliest painters of the Dutch interior. Little is known about his life; his small, finely painted interiors were long attributed to contemporaries such as Vermeer and De Hooch. Few of his works have survived, which explains his reputation as a hidden master of the Delft interior. A tranquil, warm work for a classical interior.