Anyhow the picture, beside being a beautiful painting, is very interesting to us to-day as an illustration of the domestic life of a Dutch girl of some two hundred and fifty years ago. And the same interest belongs to all the old genre pictures. They make the past still alive to our eyes; just as the genre pictures painted to-day will show some future generation how we lived. But this, I repeat, was not Vermeer’s first thought. On the other hand, I do not wish you to think that he was not himself interested in the subject of his picture. He was, I am sure; but in another way. He, no doubt, arranged the figure with great care and carefully selected and grouped the surrounding objects. But, in placing the girl, he did not try to get the graceful lines that Raphael, for example, would have imagined. Vermeer’s desire was to keep the pose and gesture natural. In this he was simply following the general motive of the artists of his country and of that time. But his own particular motive in representing the girl in the act of opening the window was that the clear outside light might stream in at the back of her figure and blend with the dimmer light of the interior.