Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid

This painting is the first known example by Terborch that presents full-length figures in a well-appointed domestic interior, thereby anticipating many compositions by him and by artists such as Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu, and Johannes Vermeer in which the same or a similar theme is addressed.

The specific subject of a woman admiring or adorning herself in front of a mirror may be traced back in Netherlandish art at least two centuries, for instance in the scene labeled “Superbia” (Pride) in Hieronymus Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins. The theme flourished in sixteenth-century art, and became one of the most common vanitas images in Dutch and Flemish art of the 1600s.