41 ond Spanish chair with lion-head finals was positioned in the foreground (figs. 8, 9).10 Vermeer shifted the map towards the right and overpainted the repoussoir chair, decluttering the interior to give more room to the domestic act that is underway. A map initially hung on the back wall in the Berlin Woman with a Pearl Necklace (figs. 10, 11), just as it does in Amsterdam’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (fig. 12) and was only abandoned after already being worked up to a high degree of finish and detail. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace Vermeer covered up the map to arrive at an image of serenity with a bare bright wall, maybe to avoid too much of a repetition with the other, slightly earlier painting of the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter that displays the Map of Holland and West-Friesland.11 In the latter painting this map was also slightly repositioned further to the right before Vermeer was pleased with the composition. dog, in the adjacent room behind the maid in A Maid Asleep (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) – ancillary background figures that Vermeer subsequently abandoned, choosing instead to add a chair to the right-hand foreground (figs. 4, 5).7 In the majestic View of Delft (Den Haag, Mauritshuis), meanwhile, the artist initially included a large male figure wearing a broad-brimmed hat in the righthand foreground, a figure that an intrepid restorer from a bygone age excavated with near archaeological rigour, only to cover it up again – just as Vermeer himself had already decided on doing (figs. 6, 7).8 Vermeer also made changes to the design of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, once believed to be by Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667) and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.9 Here, the Map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands on the back wall initially extended further to the left, behind the woman’s head, and a secFig. 6 Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, Detail with man, painted-over Fig. 7 Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, c. 1660–63, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 117.5 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, Inv. no. 92
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