Woman Reading a Book by a Window, Gabriël Metsu (1653)
Metsu has depicted a life-sized woman seated next to an open window. Leaning on a small table covered with a striped carpet, she stares out into the world as though contemplating an idea she has just taken from the text of the open book before her. Her distinctive wardrobe—a voluminous rusty-red cloak, loose-fitting white shirt, and black feathered beret—would have indicated to a seventeenth-century viewer that she was not a contemporary Dutch sitter, but a figure drawn from a different time and place.
