ABSTRACT
What happens when images let us wait, reluctant to communicate a clue or message? Jacob Vrel (active 1654–70) painted a series of unexciting and bare interiors in which single female figures are pensively waiting, unclear for what. This chapter explores the double-bind instance of waiting as embodied by the figure in the painting, and as by us, its contemporary viewers. Following Hegel’s notion that in painting we see reflected first and foremost the activities of our own mind, I argue that Vrel’s paintings are pensive images that neither tell stories nor convey specific messages, but that have been waiting for us to picture us thinking.
