Critical Assessments: What is the meaning of the Mistress and Maid?

John Nash

Vermeer
1991, pp. 83–84

Despite the surprising variety in Vermeer's small oeuvre, it would be fair to call the Frick painting anomalous. Although the canvas itself is somewhat smaller than either the Allegory of Faith or The Art of Painting, the half -length figures of the two women are larger than anything Vermeer had painted after The Procuress, approaching the size of life. Many have thought the work unfinished because of the plain dark background, and therefore that it might be one of the two paintings accepted by the baker, Van Buijten, from Vermeer's widow to pay the which Vermeer could be said to have essayed the dramatic subtlety characteristic of Ter Borch's pieces and on a grand scale. In its precise rendering of both expression and gesture it challenges comparison even with Rembrandt.

The servant's interrogative gaze is vivid (fig. 1), while the expression, the crucial expression, of the mistress is more obscure, partly because of the turn of her head, partly because of the elusiveness with which her features are represented. All that is revealed is the gesture of the hand raised to the chin. Is she surprised to receive the letter? The ambiguity of the gesture of her left hand is balanced by the obscurity of the action of her right hand. There appears to be writing on the paper before her, but the position in which she holds the pen does not suggest she has been writing. Was she writing herself when her maid interrupted with this letter? Is she preparing to reply even before she has read the letter? Or is it the mistress who has written the letter, has asked the maid to deliver it, and the maid is putting an awkward question to her employer? The relation of mistress and maid resembles that of the Rijksmuseum Love Letter (fig. 2), but in this reduced setting, without the conventional attributes of that work, there is only the ambiguity of a dumb show, and the focus is on the essential but ambivalent psychology of that relationship of quizzical servant and uncertain employer.

fig. 1Mistress and Maid (detail)
Johannes Vermeer
c. 1666–1668
Oil on canvas, 90.2 x 78.7 cm.
Frick Collection, New York

fig. 2 The Love Letter (detail)
Johannes Vermeer
c. 1667–1670
Oil on canvas, 44 x 38.5.cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

Jan Vermeer
London,
1981, p. 134

One of the most prevalent themes in Vermeer's paintings from the late 1660s is the letter writer. Unlike his earlier representations of women with letters, where he isolated one individual with the letter, these later versions all include a maid with her mistress. The introduction of the maid adds a new element to the theme: the expectations and anxieties that surround the arrival of a letter.

fig. 3 Mistress and Maid (detail)
Johannes Vermeer
c. 1666–1668
Oil on canvas, 90.2 x 78.7 cm.
Frick Collection, New York

In this painting the mistress, dressed in a yellow jacket with an ermine border, sits at a table. Her hand rests on a letter she had been writing before being interrupted by the maid. Her left hand has risen involuntarily to her chin, an unmistakable gesture of surprise and concern. The maid's forward gesture as she offers the letter reinforces the contrast in their attitudes.

Vermeer's figures from the early 1660s are usually portrayed at a moment when their movements have ceased. In the Mistress and Maid, he explored a different set of dynamics: a focus on implied movement. This new emphasis may partially explain his decision to paint these figures against a dark background. Against a light background figures are visually locked into a specific framework, while a dark background is more suggestive.

Vermeer also had other reasons to experiment with a dark, undefined background. He had found that his bust-length figure studies were particularly luminous against dark backgrounds. They also enhanced the three-dimensional quality of the figures since the modeling blended into the background (fig. 3). Interestingly, despite the successful use of this format here, it is the only instance we know in which he used an undefined background for a large composition.

The enhanced three-dimensional quality also results from the large scale of the figures and the fullness of the modeling. Compared to the Woman with a Pearl Necklace, this painting reveals a much more rich modeling of the mistress's yellow jacket. The folds are more pronounced and are articulated with increased clarity. The woman's hands are more simply poised and create quieter rhythms. A subtle abstraction of forms and color becomes evident. The mistress's eye is barely indicated; the shadow along her left arm is an unexpected purple. The result is a powerful image, suggestive of movement and psychological interaction yet maintaining a classical dignity.

Lisa Vergara

"Women, Letters, Artistic Beauty: Vermeer's Theme and Variations" Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer
2004, p. 58

Regarding the paintings' amatory themes, John Michael Montias, seeking to explain Vermeer's demographically unusual marriage to Catharina Bolnes, has suggested that love might have been a strong motive; indeed, love, as we have seen, was thought to be a source of artistic inspiration. The appeal for the painter of reading and writing women might also relate to his marriage. Catharina Bolnes carne from a higher social class than he did, and she signed documents in an elegant hand (fig. 4). An interest in calligraphy may be discerned by comparing her fine penmanship with the "unadorned, workaday signature" of her highborn mother. Vermeer's own mother, by contrast, was illiterate, and his sister, although she probably could read and write at an elementary level, wed a man who was completely illiterate at the time of their marriage. And if we consider predilections as pertaining to both life and art, it bears observing that no male figure appears in Vermeer's epistolary scenes. Indeed, one of the most noticeable consistencies of his oeuvre is an artistic devotion to women. The surviving works picture about four times the average proportion of women to men in European painting of the era, including Dutch painting. Men are not altogether absent from these scenes, of course, since a woman with a letter usually implies a man as either author or intended recipient of the depicted missive. Further, these paintings so strongly assert Vermeer's artistic individuality as to entail his own presence.

fig. 4 Declaration concerning Johan van Santen with the signatures of Vermeer and his wife Catharina Bolnes (1655)

Walter Liedtke

Vermeer: The Complete Paintings
2008, p. 129

fig. 5 Trompe-l'ceil with a Bust of Venus
Cesar van Everdingen
1665
Oil on canvas, 74 x 60.8 cm.
Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen
Mauritshuis, The Hague

The formal means by which Vermeer added emphasis to the letter's arrival are well described by Wheelock: the low horizon, the recession of the table, the parallel arms, and the bright objects between them (set off by much darker colours) make the maid's gesture all the more portentous. The dark background concentrates attention on the figures, which with the interest in distinctive physiognomy recalls Vermeer's tronien and again suggests the influence of paintings by Michiel Sweerts (fig. 6). Wheelock also discusses the painting's 'broad' (or smooth) technique, with special attention to the seated figure's face. Several scholars have speculated illogically that the mistress's face and hands may be unfinished, but this is dismissed by Wheelock's close analysis and by his large detail of the woman's head and raised hand.

In this figure Vermeer's interest in the classicist style of Cesar van Everdingen (fig. 5) and of artists such as Netscher and Karel Dujardin (in the 1660s) seems especially evident. Whether or not this picture was purchased by Vermeer's patron, Pieter van Ruijven, is uncertain. Rather surprisingly, Montias identified the painting with one that remained in the artists possession until his death and was sold by his wife to the master baker Hendrick van Buyten. But the 1696 sale of pictures owned by Van Ruijven's son-in-law, Jacob Dissius, included as lot 7 'Een Juffrouw die door een Meyd een brief gebragt word, van dito', which sold for 70 guilders. Broos maintains that this description suits the Frick picture better than The Love. Letter in Amsterdam, which is convincing, since the cataloguer usually referred to motifs such as musical instruments and 'a seethrough room' (lot 5, now lost). Ownership of the Mistress and Maid as well as A Lady Writing would also be more consistent with our tentative impression of Van Ruijven's taste, which appears to have favoured evocative understatement.

fig. 6 Clothing the Naked
Michiel Sweerts
c. 1660–1661
Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 114.3 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York

fig. 7 MA-XRF image of the Mistress and Maid

Like many artists, Vermeer made modifications in the course of developing his compositions. The elemental distribution maps obtained by MA-XRF are revealing as they show that Vermeer included a highly detailed, multi figural pictorial element in the background, with at least four figures, that he later painted out (fig. 7). This section likely represented a large tapestry or painting on the wall behind the figures. Mistress and Maid would have appeared strikingly different had Vermeer retained this pictorial element in the final composition. After deciding that a relatively dark and plain background would better focus on the women’s interactions, he added the curtain, drawn aside to direct attention on the letter’s receipt.

Vermeer frequently embellished his painted interiors with items such as maps, mirrors, paintings, and tapestries. For example, in Woman Holding a Balance, 1663–1664, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the woman’s action is contrasted with a large Last Judgment painting on the wall behind. In other cases, like in Girl with a Red Hat, 1665–1667, also in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, painted slightly before Mistress and Maid, a section of a tapestry is visible.

The hypothesis that the original figural elements in the background of Mistress and Maid were from a tapestry would explain the vertical section to the far right of the design evident in the reflectogram. This section seems to depict a sculpture in a niche and would make sense as an elaborate border surrounding the tapestry’s central scene. Although the original source of Vermeer’s inspiration for the background has not been identified, a Flemish tapestry woven after designs by Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) is a useful comparative. Here one finds a robust female figure in a posture reminiscent of the one visible in the IRR image of Mistress and Maid, near the mistress’s profile. Hanging garlands and borders populated with statues also correspond to elements discernible in the IRR. It is also possible that the unresolved portion of the composition was a painting hanging on the wall. Some of the contours of the figures are similar to those in a painting, the subject of which has been described as the finding of Moses, that appears on the wall in two other Vermeer compositions: The Astronomer, 1668, in the Musée du Louvre, and A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, 1670–1671, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Whatever this intricate design was intended to depict, Vermeer possibly felt that it distracted from the central narrative and edited it out of the final composition.

Close inspection of the IRR, supported by the MA-XRF analysis, confirms that this early idea for the background was blocked-in after the foreground figures had already been established. The IRR shows a continuous brushstroke in one of the background features extending around the contour of the maid’s shoulder. In addition, the Fe distribution map reveals a fairly clear image of the features in the tapestry. This indicates that this pattern was only sketched in neutral tones containing black and earth colors with one exception: there is a slight indication of a few features in the Cu distribution map, possibly painted in a greenish or bluish hue.

The presence of single dark layer over the ground in the three samples taken from the upper edge suggest that the tapestry was only blocked-in in neutral dark tones before the artist changed his mind and decided to paint a curtain extending over the entire background. The Ca, Pb, Fe, (fig. 7) Cu and K maps reveal the sweeping diagonal forms of a curtain hanging behind the foreground figures. The curtain modeled on top of the underlying design is intentional, and clearly integral to the final composition. Examination of the surface under magnification showed that the curtain was painted before the artist made final touches to the foreground figures.