The protagonist is Diana, the goddess of the hunt and the moon. She and her nymphs take a rest after hunting. Diana, seated in the middle, is recognisable by the crescent moon on her head.

The atmosphere is one of salutary rest. A nymph – observed by a hunting dog – carefully washes Diana’s feet. The standing woman dressed in black could be Callisto, the nymph who became pregnant from Jupiter, thereby inciting Diana’s anger. Perhaps this explains why she clutches her gown to her stomach with clenched fists.

This youthful work is rather different from Vermeer’s later paintings. This was his period of biblical and mythological representations; he was not yet depicting scenes of everyday life. Even so, this picture displays similarities to his later work, including the subdued, dreamy atmosphere and the rather granular texture of the fabric.

Vermeer was probably inspired by the Amsterdam painter Jacob van Loo, who had painted a picture of Diana and her nymphs several years earlier.

What Vermeer borrowed from Van Loo is the placing of the group in a shallow space and the poses of Diana and the woman washing her feet. The woman pulling her clothes over her head also seems to have been a source of inspiration for Vermeer, though he chose to present his nymphs in a less undressed state.

When Vermeer’s Diana and her nymphs was restored in 1999, an amazing fact came to light: the sky on the upper right appears not to have been painted by Vermeer. It contained pigments (Prussian blue and chrome green) which were not available in Vermeer’s day.

This posed a difficult question: should the painting be preserved in that state or changed? Technical research revealed that the paint layers below the sky correspond to the dark parts of the tree passages in the rest of the background.

It was decided not to remove the blue paint, since this might damage the original layer below. The sky was covered with a thin layer of dark brown paint, making the lighting more plausible and the whole more harmonious.

Examination further revealed that the painting had been cropped at some point, since the right-hand side lacks a strip around 12 centimetres wide. A computer simulation shows what the painting must have looked like in its original state.