Interior with a Woman at the Virginals

Restraint is a quality that permeates de Witte’s genre pictures. In his richly furnished domestic Interior with a Woman at the Virginals the man in the curtained bed with his clothing and his sword draped over a nearby chair are not the first things noticed when we confront its palpable space, strong sunlight, and sonorous colour harmonies. If Mondrian saw the painting it is not hard to imagine that he would have nodded his head in approval at the banded pattern made by the light on the interior’s marble floor. His approval, however, would have been anachronistic if he did not correlate it with the artist’s effort to create a plausible illusion of space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Like other seventeenth-century Dutch artists, de Witte saw an inextricable link between a picture’s formal qualities and its illusionism.