Diana and Her Companions

Diana and Her Companions is a painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in the early to mid-1650s and now held at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. Although its exact date is unknown, the work may be Vermeer's earliest surviving painting, with some art historians placing it before his Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and others after. Its solemn mood is unusual for a scene depicting the goddess Diana, and rather than illustrating one of the well known dramatic episodes from myths about her, it shows the goddess and her attendants quietly at her toilette, with a nymph washing her feet. Nothing is known of the painting's history before the mid-nineteenth century, and it was not widely accepted as a genuine Vermeer until the early twentieth century, when its similarities to Christ in the House of Martha and Mary were noticed; about a ninth of its width has since been found to have been removed from the right side, and the sky in the upper right corner was discovered around 1999 or 2000 to be a nineteenth-century addition. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/