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
A mural representing Parrhasius and Zeuxis
in the Gallery of the History of Ancient
Painting in the Hermitage.
This green curtain functions as a familiar pictorial device called repoussoir. The term repoussoir is derived from the French verb meaning to push back. Repoussoir is a means for achieving (i.e., forcing) spatial contrast and depth by placing a large figure or object in the immediate foreground of a painting’s composition. Repoussoir motifs set a dramatic entrance for the painting and help enhance the sense of scale. Caravaggio had become famous for his paintings of ordinary people or even religious subjects in repoussoir compositions. In the classical landscapes of Claude Lorraine the repoussoir element was usually a large, dimly-lit tree placed in the left-hand foreground. The Utrecht Caravaggist School frequently used human figures as repoussoir.
In a number of Vermeer's interiors there are repoussoir curtains in the foreground too, placed between the first and second window of the artist’s studio. They are pushed more or less to the left and gathered up a little at the bottom so that it gives the impression of a stage with the curtain drawn back. This creates a sense of momentary suspense.
Zeuxis and his contemporary Parrhasius (of Ephesus and later Athens) are reported in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder to have staged a contest to determine which of the two was the greater artist. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, only for Parrhasius to reveal the curtain itself was a painting, and Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Zeuxis is rumoured to have said: 'I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.
Finding of Moses
Pieter de Grebber
1634
170 x 229 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
The large, ebony-framed painting is a Finding of Moses attributed to Peter Lely, who was trained in Haarlem with Pieter de Grebber and who is known to have painted religious works in a similar fashion (see left).
The figures in Vermeer's version have been dramatically flattened and schematized following the same technique of paintings-within-paintings in other works. Curiously, the same Moses appears in the Astronomer, much smaller in scale. This should serve as a warning to the modern viewer that he is not viewing a "snapshot" of 17th-century life but rather a carefully contrived mise-en-scène which combines visual fact and fiction.
Biblical scenes were generally perceived allegorically furnishing insight into the nature of God’s divine plan. This episode (Exodus 2:1 – 10) represents the moment in which the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens discover a Hebrew baby in a basket among the marshes. The child has been hidden by his mother to escape the Pharaoh’s decree that all male Hebrew babies be put to death. The Pharaoh’s daughter saves the child and names him Moses. The story generally was interpreted as evidence of divine providence and as God’s ability to console opposing factions.
Finding of Moses undoubtedly has much to do with the scene which is being acted out by the two Dutch women below it. However, critics are not all in agreement just what Vermeer had intended to say. Peter Sutton points out that this biblical subject, expanded upon by Flavius Josephus in his widely read Jewish Antiquities was well known by Dutch history painters as an inspiration for their paintings. The Dutch interpreted the story as evidence of Divine Providence and God’s ability to bring together opposing factions.
Woman Reading a Letter (detail)
Ganriel Metsu
1662-65
53 x 40 cm
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Behind the writing mistress stands a maidservant dressed in a subdued gray outfit with a blue apron. A calm and columnar figure, her arms folded patiently on her chest, she gazes sidelong out the window waiting for her mistress to finish the letter so she may consign it to the receiver or the postal system. In marked difference with the psychological state with her mistress, the maid’s statuesque calm is conveyed by her folded arms, and her central position in the composition.
Vermeer’s figure may have been derived from a work of a similar letter theme by fellow genre painter Gabriel Metsu. Although in Metsu’s version the maid turns her back to the viewer while she momentarily distracts herself as her mistress reads a letter, she wears a surprisingly similar outfit and fulfills essentially the same role.
Vermeer often experimented with the possibilities of subverting the hierarchical positions of the figures within his compositions. In this case, the maid, who belongs to an inferior social class, stands at the exact center of the painting placed above her mistress.
Although in emblematic and popular literature maids were frequently represented as a threat to the security of the home, Dutch genre painters frequently represented the maid in a more neutral role, mindfully doing housework, caring for children or themselves supervised by the mistress of the house. In this case, the maid is treated neutrally even though Vermeer has given her an important role in the composition. Her gaze, whose emotional contents remains open for the observer to fill, amplifies the intensity of her mistress’ writing.
Of all of the many carpets depicted in Vermeer’s oeuvre, this is the most abstractly painted one of all. The decorative designs are reduced to a sort of calligraphic shorthand and the knotty texture has been completely obliterated by an exceptionally smooth, simplified application of paint.
Although little of the young mistress' facial expression can be made out, we can nonetheless intuit her rapt attention as she bends over her missive, hands joined for writing. She dons a lovely starch-white cap, whose lacework is only hinted at, a smart green bodice with puffy white sleeves and a discreet jeweled broach, an unusual piece of costume for Vermeer.
He was able to accent her importance in respects to the full-length standing maid by placing the vanishing point of the perspectival construction on the left eye of the lady herself. Although she is relegated to the farthest right-hand side of the composition, Vermeer emphasized her presence by contrasting her right-hand silhouette with a patch of bright white wall behind her, which however, appears illogically bright considering the fall of light in the rest of the room. The razor-sharp planes and angular rhythms which define her billowing blouse seem, as Arthur Wheelock put it, "to suggest the acuity of her emotional state."
The pose of the mistress seems to have been derived from the Lacemaker (see left, the detail has been reversed to facilitate comparison) and in both pictures the womens' anatomical features have been abbreviated with surprising tonal economy and calligraphic brushwork.
On small detail that animates the scene and has a potential bearing on its meaning contains a letter, a stick of sealing wax, a bright red seal, and an object that has been interpreted either as a small book or a letter with its wrapper crumpled. If it is a letter it may be one that the lady has received or one of a draft of her own which she has just discarded to which she returns so single-mindedly. The fact that the letter has been cast on the floor suggests that its contents disturbed the mistress. Letters were considered precious items in 17th-century Netherlands.
Letters were sometimes enclosed in cloth or paper (the envelope we know it was not yet in use) in the 17th century but usually were simply folded, sealed with wax, and addressed, and sometimes secured with twine. In either case, the fact that the letter and postal instruments have been cast to the floor implies a state of some agitation that belies the calm atmosphere of the interior.
Chairs appear in a great number of Dutch paintings. Many critics have hypothesized that some of the empty chairs in Vermeer's paintings may allude to an absent person, most likely a suitor or loved one. Such a reading is not confirmed by any period writings on genre painting but on the fact that chairs were always placed flat against a wall in Dutch homes when they were not being used.
In the present work, the presence of the free-standing chair and the objects tossed nearby on the floor might indicate that some action would have just taken place otherwise the vigil maid would have certainly put them both in order.
The amazing economy of the means by which reality is represented in Vermeer's late works has perhaps reached an apex. The artist has skillfully purged the observed world of anything extraneous to the theme and perfect pictorial balance of his compositions. By according the utmost weight to every single element, no matter how small, the viewer is subliminally lead to believe that he is witnessing an event of great import instead of a minor incident of the life from the remote past.
The leadings of the window seem to be identical in design with the ones in the earlier Music Lesson (see detail left) but in the present picture the central design has been colored. No one has been able to make out a figural meaning in its motif and perhaps, rather than an observed reality, it was simply colored in order to bond the empty left-hand side of the painting with the right.
The hanging curtain enhances the air of hushed privacy which, perhaps in no multi-figure work by Vermeer, pervades so strongly the "little drama" which takes place.
From a formal point of view, the curtain establishes one of three strong diagonal lines which energize the composition and alleviate the composition's strict, rectilinear design.
Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk
Thomas de Keyser
1627
92,4 x 69,3 cm
National Gallery, London
The marble flooring in this painting denotes an exceptional habitat. In reality, such a floor would have been reserved for prestigious public constructions or the front room of the wealthy home where visitors would have been received and hopefully impressed. Marble was both costly to import and work. Very likely Dutch painters, like Vermeer, overstated their real frequency and variety to suggest the most desirable qualities of bourgeois life rather than a single extant reality. Thus, in Vermeer's composition, we may very well be in front of a constructed ideal somewhat like the ones modern interior design magazines offer to stimulate the imagination of their readers.
Vermeer used the same grid layout in different paintings but altered the patterns of black and white tiles to suit the composition.
The Dutch, even the richest, generally preferred floors made of large planks of plain wood which could at least partially mitigate the coldness of the long Dutch winters. The image to the left represents Constantijn Huygens, one of the most influential Dutch men of culture in the Netherlands at his desk in official surrounding of a princely palace in The Hague attended by a servant bringing a message. Behind him hangs a rich tapestry with his coat of arms as well as various objects which could belong only to a member of the upper class. Notable are the humble wood floors.
Once again, Vermeer has paid an understated tribute to his beloved Delft by including a row of locally-made floor tiles. These stock tiles were hand-decorated with images of children's games or fantasy motifs and for many years were a secondary product of the famous Delft faience industry. They served to protect the lower walls from the daily assault of mops and brooms, to cover fireplaces and to isolate walls from the incessant Dutch humidity.
Delft potters made tiles in vast numbers (estimated at eight hundred million) over a period of two hundred years; many Dutch houses still have tiles that were fixed in the 17th and 18th century. Tiles could also function as ship ballast during the long dangerous voyages.
Such humble objects rarely bore factory markings of any kind. The approximate dating of surviving Delft blue tiles depends largely on company archives, the date of the building where they are set, the design or image. Both the size and thickness of the tiles may also be helpful. The largest photographic archive, in the Nederlands Tegelmuseum in Otterlo near Arnhem, The Netherlands, contains 70,000 images.
Even though these tiles were depicted innumerous times by Vermeer's colleagues, no one accorded them with such dignity as Vermeer.
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critical excerpt
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
- 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.
Gerard ter Borch
c. 1658-1659
56.5 x 43.8 cm.
Private collection
Gerrit ter Borch
c. 1658-1659
56.8 x 43.6 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia