Diana and Her Companions instance of painting
Description
The scene
The painting depicts the Greek and Roman goddess Diana ("Artemis" in Ancient Greece) with four of her companions. She wears a loose fitting, yellow dress with an animal-skin sash and, on her head, a diadem with a symbol of the crescent moon. As she sits on a rock, a nymph washes her left foot. Another, behind Diana, sits with her partially bare back to the viewer (the most skin Vermeer shows on a figure in any of his extant paintings), a third nymph, sitting at Diana's left, holds her own left foot with her right hand. A fourth stands in the rear, somewhat apart from the rest of the group and facing them and the viewer at an angle, her eyes cast down, her fists in front of her. A dog sits in the lower left-hand corner near Diana, its back to the viewer as it faces the goddess, her attendants and, immediately in front of it, a thistle.Attribution and relationship to other works
According to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the painting "has no visual precedent". As a depiction of Diana, the painting is notable in part for what it does not depict—neither Actaeon catching sight of Diana and her nymphs bathing nor the actual moment when Callisto's pregnancy is revealed, both popular themes in mannerist painting in the early 17th century. Nor does the artist show Diana's hot temper or her harsh reactions to those episodes. The goddess's ability as a huntress is not signalled by dead game or bows and arrows. Even the dog is depicted as a gentle animal, not like the fast hounds normally seen in paintings of Diana.Nor does the painting use Diana as an allegorical portrait, a tradition for which had developed by the mid-17th century, with identifiable women depicted as the goddess, who was also a symbol of chastity. An example of this tradition is Diana and Her Nymphs, painted by Jacob van Loo in Amsterdam around 1648, about seven or eight years before Vermeer's work. (Vermeer's Diana has frequently been compared to van Loo's. In van Loo's painting, Diana also sits in a forest clearing with a small group of companions, but the mood is very different.The similarities between Vermeer's painting and Rembrandt's style are close enough that the work was  attributed to Rembrandt's student, Nicolaes Maes when auctioned in 1876. Vermeer's signature on the painting had been altered, making it look like Maes'. During a restoration the original signature of J. v. Meer was faintly discernible, though this was ascribed to the Utrecht artist Johannes van der Meet.Vermeer is known to have incorporated other artists' ideas, techniques and the poses in which they depict subjects. Some features of Diana share the effects and techniques of Rembrandt. Diana's stout figure is much like those in Rembrandt's work, and Vermeer used thick impasto brushwork following the lines of the folds of her clothing, as Rembrandt did. Also like Rembrandt, Vermeer cast the faces of the group in shadows, which gives a more expressive, moodier cast to the scene. Vermeer's painting is very similar in feeling to Rembrandt's Bathsheba, painted in 1654, a work Vermeer very likely saw firsthand, according to Wheelock. The poses of the woman whose feet is washed and the one doing the washing are similar. It is possible that Rembrandt's former pupil, Carel Fabritius (in Delft from 1650 until his death in late 1654), may have made Vermeer familiar with Rembrandt's work.
Doubts about the attribution of the painting remained until about 1901, the year Abraham Bredius and Willem Martin, deputy director of the Mauritshuis, discovered its similarities in coloring and technique with Martha and Mary, which was signed by Vermeer, and in colors with The Procuress, another very early Vermeer work.
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