A Young Maidservant

A museum visitor’s favorite, just look at her eyes. This extraordinary depiction of a young girl – datable to around 1660 – is undoubtedly one of Michael Sweerts’s most beautiful works. It has been compared with Girl with a pearl earring, which Vermeer (1632-1675) would paint some five years later and for 10 years it hung in the Vermeer room in the Mauritshuis opposite Vermeer’s most famous painting.

“The rendering of her skin is a technical marvel on a par with Rembrandt’s or Gerard ter Borch’s greatest adventures in naturalism: rosy where it should be rosy; blue-shadowed between the bridge of the nose and the eyes.”
– Simon Schama in “Another Dimension”, The New Yorker, October 28, 2002 p. 87.

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