A painter in a striped doublet, seen from behind, paints a young woman dressed as Clio, the muse of history, with a trumpet and a book. A heavy tapestry is pulled aside like a curtain. Vermeer never sold it and kept it until his death.

Look at the large map on the wall: a crease runs down it, roughly along the line that divided the Netherlands into north and south. In 1940 Hitler bought the painting for his planned museum. It was returned to Austria after the war.