Diana and her Nymphs

Diana and her Nymphs, also called Diana and Her Companions, is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer from the early to mid-1650s (about 1653–1656), held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1876.

It may be Vermeer's earliest surviving painting; scholars disagree whether it came before or after Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. The goddess Diana, a crescent moon on her diadem, sits on a rock in a loose yellow dress while a kneeling companion washes her foot over a brass basin. Another nymph, her back half bare, sits behind her, a third holds her own foot in a pose recalling the ancient Spinario, and a fourth stands apart with lowered eyes; a dog sits at lower left beside a thistle. Rather than the dramatic episodes of Actaeon or Callisto, Vermeer shows a quiet moment of the goddess's toilette, with no hunting gear and faces sunk in shadow. Arthur Wheelock found in it a solemnity closer to Christian than mythological tradition, the foot-washing recalling Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet.

The stout figures, thick impasto and shadowed faces point to Rembrandt, and the mood has been compared with his Bathsheba of 1654; Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt's former pupil working in Delft, may have been the link. The picture has also often been compared with a Diana by Jacob van Loo of about 1648.

Nothing is known of its history before the mid-19th century. At the Goldsmid sale in Paris on 4 May 1876 it was bought for the Dutch state as a work by Nicolaes Maes, its signature having been altered; doubts about the attribution persisted until around 1901, when Abraham Bredius and Willem Martin noted its closeness to Martha and Mary. The canvas, now 98.5 × 105 cm, has been cut down, losing about 15 cm on the right, and the restoration of 1999–2000 found that the patch of blue sky at upper right was a 19th-century addition, which restorers covered with foliage.