The Wine Glass

The Wine Glass, also called The Glass of Wine or Lady and Gentleman Drinking Wine, is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, made around 1658–1661, and held by the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which bought it in 1901.

Painted when Vermeer was in his late twenties, it follows the type of genre scene that Pieter de Hooch developed in Delft in the late 1650s: figures placed in the middle ground of a brightly lit room whose architecture is clearly defined. The motif of a woman drinking at a table comes from De Hooch, but Vermeer moves it into a far more elegant household, with fine clothes, a patterned tablecloth, a gilt-framed landscape on the back wall and a coloured coat of arms in the window. Walter Liedtke called it one of Vermeer's first fully mature works.

A young woman in a red dress has just drained her glass while a standing man, hand on the jug, waits to refill it; a cittern and music books lie on a chair. The scene is usually read as courtship, though the roles are ambiguous. The window's coat of arms has been linked with Janetge Jacobsdr. Vogel of Delft, and its female figure was traditionally read as Temperance holding a bridle, a warning against excess; more recently Ariane van Suchtele argued that she holds the straps of the coat of arms instead. The same window appears in Vermeer's Girl with a Wine Glass in Brunswick, and Huib Zuidervaart has proposed, without archival proof, that both pictures were wedding gifts for grandchildren of the Van Nederveen family.

The canvas, about 65 by 77 cm, appeared at a Delft sale on 18 July 1736, belonged to the Hope family of Amsterdam and later of Deepdene in Surrey, and passed through the London trade before entering the Berlin museum.