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Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (1664) depicts a private, contemplative moment and is a superb example of the artist’s exquisite sense of order and rhythm.
Woman Holding a Balance (Dutch: Vrouw met weegschaal), also called Woman Testing a Balance, is an oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Woman Holding a Balance is a superb example of Johannes Vermeer’s exquisite sense of stability and rhythm. A woman dressed in a blue jacket with fur trim stands serenely at a table in a corner of a room. The scales in her right hand are at equilibrium, suggestive of her inner state of mind.
Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1664, oil on canvas, 42.5 x 38 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) Is it a cautionary tale of vanity? A prompt for introspection? Art historians are still weighing the evidence.
Whether conveying the vanity of worldly possessions, or the need for moderation and restraint in life, Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance exemplifies the artist's ability to distill scenes to their essence and create perfectly balanced compositions that seem at once realistic and idealized.
Woman Holding a Balance is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer from about 1664. It depicts a woman standing serenely before a table that bears a jewelry box while she waits for her small handheld balance to come to rest. The work uses symbolism to tell a lofty story through an ordinary scene.
A young woman in a shadowy room gently holds a balance in her hand. She waits for it to come to a rest, possibly to weigh the gold and silver coins and jewellery that lie on the table....
Woman Holding a Balance, also called Woman Testing a Balance, is an oil painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Vermeer. At one time the painting, completed 1662–1663, was known as Woman Weighing Gold, but closer evaluation has determined that the balance in her hand is empty.
Woman Holding a Balance gives the impression, even more powerfully than Woman Putting On Pearls, of being a distillation, and an open assertion, of the values implicit in Vermeer's work as a whole.
The woman is poised between the earthly treasures of gold and pearls and a visual reminder of the eternal consequences of her actions. Vermeer emphasized this message through his superbly refined...