large picture, 3. 2 metres high and 2. 76 metres wide, depicting several figures inside a vast interior space. the foreground is filled with light, mainly falling on a group of girls in fine dresses, and also, although less harshly, on a man on the left side of the picture, who appears to be a painter. elements further back in the image, including two additional figures, are in shadow, except for a distant doorway with the silhouette of a man, and an illuminated image of a man and a woman inside a frame on the back wall. from the right, there streams in through an invisible window the pure volume of a light that renders all representation visible ; to the left extends the surface that conceals, on the other side of its all too visible woven texture, the representation it bears. the light, by flooding the scene 