A Young Woman standing at a Virginal

A Young Woman standing at a Virginal is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, dated on grounds of style and costume to about 1670–1672, near the end of his career; it measures 51.7 × 45.2 cm and has belonged to the National Gallery, London, since 1892.

A young woman in fine silks and a pearl necklace stands at a virginal with her hands on the keys and turns to look straight at us. Light floods in from the leaded windows at left, catching her pale yellow skirt, the gilt frame of a small landscape and the blue velvet of an empty chair in the foreground. The room, with its marble floor and skirting of Delft tiles, belongs to a prosperous home; the landscape painted inside the instrument's lid was a costly extra. The National Gallery notes that both that lid painting and the small landscape on the wall resemble works by the Delft painter Pieter Groenewegen.

Behind her hangs a large picture of Cupid holding up a card, in the style of Cesar van Everdingen. A similar Cupid appears in Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Girl Interrupted at Her Music, and it may be the painting recorded in his widow's house in 1676. The motif derives from Otto van Veen's emblem book of 1608, where Cupid with a raised card illustrates the motto that a lover ought to love only one; whether this is a warning or a commendation cannot be known. The empty chair has suggested that she is waiting for someone.

The picture is often linked with A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, also in the National Gallery. The two are almost the same size, share a blue and yellow colour scheme with unusually extensive ultramarine, and a recent study found their canvases came from the same bolt; some see them as contrasting images of faithful and mercenary love, though the idea is speculative. By 1866 the standing woman belonged to the critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, and the Gallery bought it after his collection was sold in Paris in December 1892. David Hockney included it in his 1977 painting Looking at Pictures on a Screen.