Lady Writing a Letter
with her Maid

(Schrijvende vrouw met dienstbode)

c. 1670-1671
oil on canvas
28 x 23 in. (71.1 x 58.4 cm.)
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

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Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, Johannes Vermeer

critical excerpt

signed on the table, under the hand of the writing lady

c. 1670
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997

c. 1670-1671
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008

The support is a plain weave linen canvas with a thread count of 14 x 14 per cm2. The canvas has been lined and the original tacking edges have been removed, Strainer bar marks 2.6 cm long from the fold edge can be seen on the top, bottom and right edges. The lesser degree of cusping on the left side, together with the lack of strainer marks, may indicate that the canvas has been cut down on this side.

The ground, a warm buff gray visible on the window frame where the lead casts shadows,: along a few contours in the figures, and in places along the shadowed edge of the carpet.

The carpet is very sketchy and appears almost unfinished: instead of the soft transitions bright blocks of color have been placed next to each other. The lady's white sleeve was painted wet-in-wet. Incised lines were used to define the tiled floors; the trailing corner of the carpet can be seen to flow into these lines. A dent in the paint in the lady's left eye marks the vanishing point of the composition. The background paint overlaps the maid's blue apron. The edge of the lower part of the green curtain appears to have been slightly further to the left.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock)

literature

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  • The artist's widow, Catharina Bolnes (1675-76);
  • on 27 January 1676, together with another painting as security for a dept toVan Buyten;
  • Hendrick van Buyten, Delft (1676-d.1701);
  • Josua van Belle, Rotterdam (before d.1710);
  • his widow, Ida Catharina van der Meyden, Rotterdam (1710-29);
  • Van Belle sale, Rotterdam, 6 September 1730, no. 92;
  • Franco van Bleyswijck, Delft (d.1734);
  • inherited by Catharina van der Burch (wife of Hendrick van Slingelandt), The Hague (1734-61);
  • Heirs Van Slingelandt, The Hague (1761);
  • Maria Catharina van Slingelandt, The Hague (1761-71), or Agatha van Slingelandt, The Hague (1761-75);
  • (?) Barthout van Slingelandt, Dordrecht (1771-98) or Willem Bentinck, The Hague (1775-98);
  • Viktor von Miller zu Aichholz, Vienna (before 1881, sold to Sedelmeyer);
  • [Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, sold in 1881 to Secrétan];
  • E. Secrétan, Paris (1881-89);
  • Secrétan sale, Paris, 1 July 1889, no. 140 (to Boussod, Valadon & Co.);
  • Collection Marinoni, Paris;
  • [Kleinberger, Paris];
  • Alfred Beit, London (c. 1895-1906);
  • Sir Otto Beit, Baronet, London (1906-30);
  • Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet, London and (from 1952) Russborough, near Dublin (1930-87, stolen in 1974 and 1986);
  • The National Gallery of Ireland (bequeathed by Beit in 1987; the painting was recovered in 1993).

The Eavesdropper (detail)
Nicholaes Maes
1657
Dordrecht Museum, Dordrecht

Maids, at times considered a sort of necessary evil, frequently enjoyed the dubious privilege of being the subject of popular literature and plays. They spoke their mind to their masters and mistress and were pictured as untrustworthy, the most dangerous women of all. However, the fact that they are portrayed so many times in family portraits, may be a sign that in some cases they were successfully integrated into the family, the fundamental unit of Dutch society.

Servants, largely female, made up about six percent of the Dutch population, and between ten and twenty percent of all households had servants which were largely female. Their importance was such that some towns had issued regulations to settle the disputes between masters and servants. For example, if a servant had been hired with sold references from her last employer, the new employer was forbidden to fire her before the terms of the original hire, usually six months.

Vermeer’s maids, although not portraits in the true sense of the term, are nonetheless shown in a relatively neutral attitude. However, the humble milkmaid is perhaps the most sympathetic portrayal of the maid in the history of Dutch painting and has become to stand for domestic virtue and moral value of hard-working Dutch society as a whole.

At the Linen Closet (detail)
Pieter de Hooch
1665
72 x 77,5 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The fact that the Dutch word for clean (schoon) also means beautiful always draws a smile from those who are familiar with the spotlessness of Dutch homes. In Vermeer's time, no visitor ever failed to note the spic and span Dutch towns which were ceaselessly swept, scrubbed, burnished, moped and washed. According to an account of an English visitor, "The beauty and cleanliness of the streets are so extraordinary that Persons of all rank do not scruple, but seem to take pleasure in walking in them."

Within the house, Dutch women followed a cleaning regime with military regimen. The popular household manual devoted an entire chapter to the weekly task which was expected to be followed with religious devotion. On every weekend morning, the steps of the house had to be cleaned, on Wednesday the whole house had to be gone over, Tuesday afternoons were devoted to dusting, Thursdays for scrubbing and scouring and Fridays the cleaning of the cellar and kitchen.

Although recent research has shown a growing concern of Italian writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century for personal hygiene, clean houses, and tidy urban spaces, cleanliness was confined to the higher echelons of urban society. According to contemporary writing, ordinary citizens, the poor and peasants were either ignored or used as a dirty contrast to the aristocracy, with peasants embodying the hallmark of dirtiness. Only maids that cleaned the houses of the bourgeois families. Were expected to maintain high standards of hygiene. Differently, in Holland, cleanliness involved the houses of a people both in towns and in the countryside. Foreign visitors on boat trips from Amsterdam to witness the cleanliness in the surrounding villages.

The origins of Dutch cleanliness has never been fully explained. Contemporary observers linked the vehement cleaning of houses, streets, and ships to the humidity of the Dutch climate. Regular scrubbing would prevent furniture and wooden floors from moulding and rotting. However, weather conditions were quite similar in other parts of the North Sea area where no such culture of cleanliness existed. In a recent study, the historians Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom have argued convincingly that Dutch cleanliness was closely bound to the commercialization of the all-important butter and dairy products both which require a extraordinary attention to hygiene. They estimate that by the he turn of the sixteenth century half of all rural households and up to one third of urban households in Holland produced butter and cheese.

The rendering of this work is so uncomplicated that some critics have asserted that it was not finished when it left the painter’s easel. However, it compares quite well with the artist’s late style which tends towards highly abstracted forms instead of descriptive detail. In fact, Vermeer’s art was championed by abstract painters of the 20th century who perceived their own art-for-art’s-sake doctrine. The degree to which Vermeer abstracted the observed world into pictorial terms is not always apparent. If one isolates the billowing starch-white sleeves from the rest of the painting, they are almost unrecognizable.

Man's propensity towards abstracting visual phenomena has proved vexing to explain in detail but it is generally held that the human mind tends to organize shapes in accordance with its own principle function: recognition and perhaps the retrieval of stored information. Abstraction reflects the way the human mind thinks. That is, it tends to reduce the infinite complexities of visual phenomena to its simplest structure working towards the most regular, symmetrical geometrical shape attainable under the circumstances. The mind abstracts visual information automatically without any conscious intervention whatsoever.

For the painter, abstraction is a tool which is consciously employed to aid recognition, but also to enhance those aspects of reality which he deems most important to communicate.

Perhaps one of the great achievements of Vermeer was his uncanny ability to relate painting technique, compositional design and, at times, even linear perspective to the theme of his work. Moreover, this accomplishment is never won at the cost of subverting a naturalistic reading of the scene depicted.

Linear perspective is an all-important tool used to systematically establish a coherent sense of depth to a realist painting and to create the sensation that the various objects which appear in different positions and at different distances from the viewer can be intuitively, yet securely located within that space. In this system, all lines parallel with the viewer's line of sight recede to the horizon towards the so-called vanishing point. The vanishing point stands opposite to the viewer which in the case of a painting, the painter.

In the present work if we extend the traceable orthogonals of the perspectival system to locate the vanishing point, we find that they converge on the face (precisely, the right-hand eye) of the seated mistress. Thus, while working, Vermeer sat directly in front of the seated woman with his eye at the same height from the ground as hers. Consequentially, even though the standing, column-like maid is placed dead-center at the heart of the composition, the perspectival system leads the viewer's eye to the mistress who is the expressive and true thematic heart of the painting.

Although Vermeer's paintings may appear straightforward depictions of reality, they are highly complex elaborations of theme and pictorial language. In the present work, these two values are interwoven with exceptional mastery, each one discreetly enhancing the other. Particularly successful is the sub theme which concerns the relationship between the two women who belong to different social levels, the writing mistress and her attending maid. This asymmetric relationship seems to have intrigued Vermeer since he elaborated on it other times. A revealing comparison between the Love Letter and the present work can be made.

In both pictures Vermeer placed a maid standing behind her mistress who, however, is positioned lower on the picture plane than her social subordinate. Here, the similarities between the two pairings stop because the emotional interaction that Vermeer intends to convey is quite different.

In the Love Letter (see detail left), the two women are entangled in a subtly confrontational relationship making direct eye contact. The maid lowers her head towards her mistress in a relaxed, easy-going pose. The mistress, instead, is constrained to raise her head as she nervously investigates the expression of her maid who most likely knows something more about the content of the letter which she has just handed over than her mistress. The intertwining between the two figures is enhanced on the pictorial level by the sinuous, shared contours of the figures. They touch not only with their eyes. The transitory nature of the muted drama is reinforced by the gesture of the mistress who momentarily holds her unopened letter in the air.

On the other hand, the relationship of the maid and mistress in the present picture speak of division. The two women face different directions. The maid looks out the window away from her mistress attempting to isolate herself from the uncomfortable situation while her mistress is intimately involved in the response to a letter hastily cast down on the floor. As with her folded arms, she keeps her thoughts to herself. While the two figures are in close proximity analogous to the pair in the Love Letter, their contours converge but never touch (see diagram lower left). The two women remain divided both on the picture plane and in thought.

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