Woman in Blue Reading a Letter

Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter seems so harmonious in color, theme and mood that it is hard to imagine any other compositional solution. Indeed, as in others of his paintings, one has difficulty imagining Vermeer at work, as an artist who had to somehow compose and make tangible a concept he had conceived in his mind. Part of the problem in visualizing Vermeer's working procedure stems from the lack of available information. No drawings, prints or unfinished paintings-indeed, no records of commissions-offer clues to his intent or aspects of his working process.

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, 1995

No signature appears on this work.

c. 1663-1664
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1663-1664
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The support is a fine, plain-weave linen with a thread count of 14.3 x 14.4 per cm². The support has been wax-resin lined and the original tacking edges have been removed. The dark gray ground contains chalk, umber, and lead white. The paint layers extend to the edge of the trimmed canvas on all sides. Some areas, such as the chair and the woman's yellow skirt, have ocher underpainting.

The surface is pitted, primarily in the white mixtures, but also in the blue parts of the background and jacket. Some blanching is evident in the blue tablecloth. The paint surface is slightly abraded, particularly in the raised edges of the paint.

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

literature

exhibitions

Judging by the serenity which reigns in Vermeer's painting of the early 1660s, one could never imagine how troublesome the artist's personal life had been in those years. In 1663, Willem Bolnes, the brother of Vermeer's wife Catharina, had targeted the artist's family with his uncontrollable outbreaks as he had done in his own family of origin. The situation had deteriorated to the point that his sister Cornelia Thins, who was about to die in 1661, decided to disinherit him.

On various occasions in the past, Willem Bolnes had created a violent commotion in the house, to such an extent that many people gathered before the door. He swore at his mother, calling her an old popish swine, a she-devil, and other such ugly swear words for which in the words of a testimony, "for the sake of decency, must be passed over." Vermeer's maid, Tanneke Everpoel, saw that Bolnes had pulled a knife and tried to wound his mother with it. She further declared that Maria Thins had suffered so much violence from her son that she dared not go out of her room and was forced to have her food and drink brought. Also that Bolnes committed similar violence from time to time against the daughter of Maria's, the wife of Johannes Vermeer, "threatening to beat her on diverse occasions with a stick, notwithstanding the fact that she was pregnant to the last degree."

The Letter
Gerard ter Borch
c. 1660-1662
81.9 x 68.2 cm
The Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace

Art historians have debunked the long-held tenet that Dutch interior painters, like Vermeer, furnished literal transcriptions of the daily life in 17th-century Netherlands. We now know that such interiors were "constructed" rather than "found." Thus, they offer a highly selective view of an ideal world rather than a snapshot of reality. In reference specifically to the art of Gerard ter Borch, perhaps Vermeer's most talented colleague, art historian Alison Kettering suggests that such elaborate paintings not only registered prevailing ideals about women's behavior but help construct and define models to which the owners of such paintings could aspire.

In particular, Maria de Knuijt, the wife of Vermeer's patron Pieter van Ruijven, might have found particularly appealing the chaste dignity which signals Vermeer's interpretations of femininity. Encouragement by faithful, sympathetic patrons to explore domestic subjects no doubt nourished his artistic perfectionism as well as his sense of self.

According to Marieke de Winkel, Dutch costume expert, pregnancy "was not a common subject in art and there are very few depictions of maternity wear. Even in religious paintings such as the Visitation, where depictions of pregnant women is required, the bodies of the Virgin and Saint Elizabeth were usually completely concealed by draperies." De Winkel further argues that "to my knowledge there are no examples of pregnant women in Dutch portraiture, an interesting fact considering that many women were painted in their first year of marriage, a time when they could have been with child." Pregnancy was most likely not seen as aesthetically attractive.

Arthur Wheelock has written that "Dutch fashions in the mid-17th century seemed to have encouraged a bulky silhouette. The impression of the short jacket worn over a thickly padded skirt in Vermeer's painting in particular may create just such an impression."

Woman Tearing a Letter
Dirk Hals
1631
45 x 55 cm
Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum, Mainz

Although his genius has never been questioned in moderm times, Vermeer was not a particularly inventive painter. Lawrence Gowing, one of the most perceptive Vermeer critics and a painter himself, was the first to point out that it is hard to find a single theme of any boldness in his work which is not based on precedent. After decades of analysis and comparative study, it has become evident that the majority of his figure motifs, including letter readers or writers, are directly derivative.

Dirk Hals (1591-1656), the brother of the famous portraitist Frans Hals, had already pioneered the letter-writing theme by 1631, one year before Vermeer was born. By the time Ter Borch had virtually perfected the subject, Vermeer had only just turned from his first faltering history paintings to this new idiom. Ter Borch's Woman Writing a Letter predates in composition, theme and mood Vermeer's own work by the same title by almost a decade. A comparison between De Hooch's Goldweigher and Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance provides an astounding example to what extent Vermeer was willing to appropriate thematic and compositional elements, practically verbatim, from his colleagues.

Borrowing successful motifs was standard procedure at the time when painters sold their works on the open, competitive market.

Cupid Presenting a Letter to a Maiden
Emblem from Jan Harmenz. Krul
Pampiere Wereld
(Amsterdam, 1644), vol. 2
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

The immensely popular 17th-century paintings of letter reading and letter writing evoke two separate worlds of time and space: the world of the writer or reader depicted by the artist on his canvas and the world of the absent person. These images are so captivating, especially when we are dealing with the love-letter theme, precisely because we will never know the contents of the letters. However, even if pictorial convention suggests that private letters were written by suitors or lovers, recent investigation of period letters written by women show that they deal with a much wider range of subjects than love. Most, in fact, were designed to strengthen social relationships or maintain friendships.

Curiously, the present-day reader must take into account that although the Netherlands enjoyed the highest rate of literacy in Europe, not all who read were able to write, this being especially so with women who generally were given less formal education than boys and were prohibited from attending Latin schools. Marriage registries in Amsterdam which had to be signed by both the bride and groom reveal that one out of three men and two out of three women could not sign their own name. Even accounting for the fact that Amsterdam was a magnet for foreign workers the statistics are nonetheless high by the standards of the day.

Letters, not only a means practical means for communication of business matters, had also become an accepted art form in 17th-century Dutch literature in spite of the classic and Christian ideals of poetry and pose. However, contemporary emblem books characterize letter writing, especially love letters, as a vain pastime and admonish the reader of the transitory nature of worldly existence.

Houwelijck
"Virgin, Lover, Bride, Wife, Mother, Widow"
Jacob Cats
1652

Lover letters became a widespread fashion in the Netherlands and quickly a serious matter. Jacob Cats, the unchallenged "best-seller" of Dutch moralistic literature, took as disapproving attitude to females writing love letters in his Houwelijck (Marriage, 1652), a monumental written example of female conduct described through successive stages of a woman's life.

Cats describes how—within the early months of marriage—the woman had to transform herself from vrijster (courtship girl) to vrouwe (housewife, house manager). To what point real Dutch woman heeded Cats' warnings is unknown.

In the section called "Trouringh" a young female called Rosette dialogues with a slightly older, recently married woman called Sibille about the dangers in composing love letters. To Rosette's question concerning the opportunity to express her feelings through writing, Sibille responds thus:

To write to a young fellow
Is never becoming of a maid;
Your good name, oh demure creature,
Must not be committed to paper;
If someone even lets one word slip out
When the youth gather,
It flies like the wind
So that no one can find it again;
Yet it is not as enduring
As that which is written by the bold pen;
And there follows a quarrel,
As often arises between lovers,
So your letter' and its outrageous statements,
Is announced to the public
And there is no denying it,
The big letters are clearly visible,
And leaves you with the greatest regret,
You will then suffer reproaches;
Thus have you shamed honorable love;
Never write stupid letters.

The woman's satin garment is painted almost entirely with shades of ultramarine blue, white and small quantities of black in the deepest shadows. Vermeer used blue more than any other "strong" color. The fact that he preferred the highest grade of natural ultramarine, the most brilliant and expensive blue pigment available of his time, testifies to the importance he associated with its optical quality and it is not out of the question that the noble lineage of this "pigment of pigments" may have exerted influence on his choice. In the later years of financial hardship his patron Pieter van Ruijven perhaps financed such an expensive habit.

Perhaps the satin dress of the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter best illustrates the psychological power of blue. Throughout history blue was the color of all heavenly gods. It stands for distance, the divine and the spiritual. This interpretation goes back to ancient Egyptians and was taken on by later cultures. From a psychological point of view blue tends to invoke dreamlike states. It instills yearnings, has a calming effect and leads to meditative introspection. Ultramarine blue, which seems to have been employed almost obsessively in the present picture, is even found in the light gray mixtures of the wall and the round ball of the map hanger. Vermeer used the same technique in the Woman Holding a Water Pitcher of the same years.

Natural ultramarine pigment (the coloring substance of paint) is made of the powder of the crushed semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. After being thoroughly purified by repeated washings, the powder is bonded to a drying oil through hand mulling. Only stones of the highest quality could be prepared just by washing and grinding. For lower qualities a laborious method of extracting the mineral lazurite was necessary, which Cennini described in his treatise (c. 1390). The best varieties of lapis lazuli were imported from Afghanistan via Venice.

Although iconographic studies of Vermeer's paintings have yielded important insights into his mode of constructing and conveying concealed meaning, caution should not be put aside when examining the minutiae of his motifs.

On several occasions Vermeer included the same precise objects in significantly different settings and activities. The map of the Netherlands which appears in the present painting, for example, also appears bathed in sunshine in early Officer and Laughing Girl and shrouded in darkness in the late Love Letter. Moreover, Vermeer painted out two large maps, one in the Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the other in the Milkmaid. While the map of Holland in the Officer and Laughing Girl has been linked to the courting soldier who attempts to "conquer" the young girl much as a military campaign conquers land, the same reading would be disastrous if associated with the other pictures.

The appearance of the same map in different contexts tends to undermine the idea of a specific symbolic function for each painting. In his seminal study of Pieter de Hooch, an artist who deeply influenced Vermeer's choice of subject matter, Peter Sutton wrote that it is more probable that the artist was in the habit of quoting familiar sources, usually prints, without much concern for their symbolic content, rather than invoking multiple interpretability. No iconographic interpretation has been advanced in the case of De Hooch's omnipresent maps. It is more likely that Vermeer deployed his maps as compositional and decorative elements analogous to the scores of other Dutch interior painters of the time.

As Arthur Wheelock wrote, "the refinements of this composition are so exquisite that it is difficult to understand how he achieved them." In no other painting did Vermeer create such a meaningful relationship between the "structural framework of the setting and the emotional content of the scene."

The narrative of the picture is of the utmost simplicity and is perhaps Vermeer's interior which has most successfully resisted scholarly interpretation. It shows a young woman in her morning dress as she carefully reads the contents of a letter. Art historians are sure that it is a love letter.

The bell-shaped woman occupies the direct center of the painting, her tight pose exalting both intensity of her emotions and her withdrawal from the surroundings. The large wall map behind her and the table to the lower left securely embraces her within a rectangular pictorial world. The chair to the lower right "protects" her from lateral intrusion while the back of the chair which surfaces from behind the table seals her in from the left. The only signal of the contents of her thoughts is suggested by the swirling patterns of the map which swirl around her. Anecdotal details which might distract the viewer from the central theme are religiously excluded. The few objects on the table constitute perhaps the most Spartan of still lives in the artist's oeuvre.

However, the composition's deceptive simplicity was not achieved without significant revision and artistic license. Autoradiographs reveal that the woman originally wore a different kind of jacket which presumably had fur trimming and flared out like the ones in many other pictures by Vermeer. Wheelock points out that given the lighting scheme and restricted distance of the figure from the back wall, Vermeer eliminated a large shadow which the woman would have cast on the background wall. The edge of the map too, once extended a few centimeters to the left.

Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692-1766)
Concerto Armonico no. 3, Largo-Andante [1.34 MB]
http://www.amazon.com/Wassenaer-Concerti-Unico-Wilhelm-van/dp/B00006RHPO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1255264489&sr=1-2