[Ann Drysdale]

But paintings were never intended for galleries; they were painted for patrons. If someone asked Vermeer to put in a putto, he'd probably have done it and if someone later offered to buy the picture if the babe were disappeared, someone else would probably have made it so.

[Allen Tice]

That’s good, Ann. I’ve always respected your mind and control of facts. My strong feeling, as I’ve mentioned, is that the cupid is alien to Vermeer’s sensibility. I have nothing against foreskins or cupids, but if anyone is interested in Vermeer as Vermeer the artist, that second-rate cartoon should disappear again.

[Julie Steiner]

Psst...Allen...Vermeer seems to have put the same Cupid painting in the background of three other paintings:

1. A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (The National Gallery, London), whose Google Arts and Culture webpage says:

The figure painting in the background shows Cupid standing in a landscape, holding up a playing card or tablet. The motif is adopted from a well-known emblem book by Otto van Veen, entitled ‘Only One’ with a verse praising fidelity in matters of love.

The painting’s style is reminiscent of Caesar van Everdingen, but no such painting has been identified in the artist’s oeuvre. It may be a painting of Cupid mentioned in the inventory drawn up in 1676 of the possessions of Vermeer’s widow.

2. Girl Interrupted at Her Music (The Frick Collection, New York), whose Wikipedia entry says:

The hazy painting in the background of the scene is of Cupid. The painting within a painting was discovered after its restoration in 1907; it had been covered up by a wall and a hanging violin. Several observations have been made about the Cupid painting and what it could have to do with the overall painting, including that Cupid may be warning the couple about the dangers of love, that Cupid's upraised hand was a symbol that you must only have one lover, that Cupid is holding up a blank card which represents love as a game, or shows that "love is in the air". The reason for Vermeer including the miniature Cupid painting may never be revealed due to the painting's damaged condition.

3. A Maid Asleep (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), whose entry in The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue says:

The lower part of a black-framed picture on the background wall allows us to see part of the left leg of a standing child and a mask. The obscured figure has been associated with two contemporary images: an emblem in Otto van Veen's popular Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608) and a standing Cupid holding up a card, in the style of Cesar van Everdingen. The background painting in A Maid Asleep probably corresponds to a Cupid described in an inventory list of household goods of the Thins-Vermeer residence taken after the artist's death.

Vermeer must have been attached to the Cupid painting since he pictured it again in the Girl Interrupted at her Music and the later Lady Standing at a Virginals, in both cases without a trace of a mask. Furthermore, it once assumed a dominant compositional role in the early Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window but was painted out by the artist himself for an unknown reason.

Apparently that last sentence will need a bit of updating, since the restorers of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window contend that differences in the layer of microscopic dust between the layers of paint and varnish in various areas indicate that the Cupid painting could not have been painted over during Vermeer's lifetime.

[Allen Tice]

Anything to sell a piece of sailcloth to a rich boob. “You want egg in that beer, Mynheer? Will that be poached or hard boiled? I can do an omelette even. Costs more.”

[Ann Drysdale]

Julie, this is fascinating. I don't know enough about Vermeer's total oeuvre to do more than speculate but that doesn't stop me doing so. I note that it's a different representation of Cupid in each case so it's more than just copying a particular painting. I still wonder where the eventual buyer fits in.

I'm not a particular admirer of Vermeer, apart from one painting that I saw for the first time low down on a wall in the Rijksmuseum. It stopped me in my tracks. I didn't even know who painted it - I'd just come out of a roomful of Vermeers and thought it must be someone else's - Hobbema perhaps, on a very good day...

So I'll go back and peer again at The Little Street, looking for traces of Cupid.

[Allen Tice]

Thanks Ann, but awwright, couldn’t painters who paint for money suffer from cupidity? — Maybe everything I love is wrong! Stand back, I hope a metanoia isn’t afoot! Let’s demote Vermeer for being whatever he was: venal, penile, senile in utero, exhume the art. Burn Vermeer as a MCP. Oh, sweet Vermeer. Shakespeare was a dog too.

[Allen Tice]

Actually, to my eye, the Woman at Virginal painting makes huge sense.

This is me ranting: But I’m So glad that none of these Cupids have theriomorphic horns. Yick.

I’m about to shut up.