The book opens with Johannes and Catharina Vermeers visiting Griet’s home. They meet Griet chopping vegetables in her mother’s kitchen. At the time, Griet does not know why the Vermeers are there, but she soon learns that she is being hired to work as a maid in their household and, in particular, to clean the painter’s studio.

The next morning Griet arrives at the Vermeer household, which is in the Catholic section of Delft. On the street outside the house she meets the five Vermeer children, Maertge, Lisbeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, and the baby Johannes. When she enters the house, what she is most struck by is the vast number of paintings—particularly the paintings with religious themes that she takes to be Catholic, since Protestants “did not have such pictures in our houses, or our churches, or anywhere” (17). Tanneke, the maid and the household’s cook, shows her around the house and tells her that in addition to cleaning Vermeer’s studio, she’ll be taking up the duties of laundry and shopping and that she will be sleeping in the cellar below one of the storage rooms.

Griet begins her work immediately, going to the canal to get water for her laundry duties, with the Vermeer children tagging along.