A soberly dressed woman sits in a darkened room, working diligently on her sewing. The only light comes from a lamp on the table, filling the room with deep, ominous shadow. An older man in a fur hat touches her shoulder with one hand and with the other presents a fistful of coins. But who are these people? What will the woman choose: to do her work and ignore the man, or to put down her sewing to take the money?
Virtue or vice? Painted by one of the few well-known female artists working in the Dutch Republic, its subject matter is unusual in Dutch art, though it has strong ties to several visual and symbolic traditions. Its diminutive size—a mere Judith Leyster lived and worked primarily in the Dutch city of Haarlem, one of the centers of artistic innovation in the first half of the seventeenth century.
The city had benefitted from an influx of artists and artisans who fled Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands now Belgium during the 80 Years War. Leyster was a member of the Guild of St. Luke the guild for painters and several other trades , which was unusual for a woman.
Like many of her colleagues including Frans Hals, Dirck Hals, and Pieter Codde, she primarily painted scenes of everyday people doing everyday things otherwise known as genre scenes. Her work is distinctive for the flat background that gives little sense of an illusionistic interior space.
On the surface, the painting shows an awkward interaction between a man and a woman. Dutch art often seems to reflect everyday life. Yet there are reasons to interpret these images symbolically, and not just as a reflection of life as it was lived. Since religious art was not being produced for the church in this Protestant country , morality had to be instilled in other ways. Secular genre scenes are often perceived as having a role to play in the moral education of the populace, either in presenting an image of ideal behavior or the consequences of bad behavior.
