Some Considerations about "Young Woman Seated at a Virginal": Comparisons with Vermeer's Later Works

(part two)

It is a well known that Vermeer often retraced his steps extending his artistic vision on the consolidated ground of his own accomplishments and frequently on the accomplishments of other artists as well. He quoted liberally from his own paintings entire passages. For example, the pose of the young girl in The Guitar Player is almost identical to that of the mistress in The Love Letter and the young lady in The Lacemaker is undoubtedly related, although mirrored in pose and lighting, to that of the mistress in A Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.  Another example is the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

However, even a cursory comparison shows that in each pair of related paintings some elements of context, lighting, composition or scale have been significantly altered from one composition to the next allowing each work to achieve complete artistic independence. Since the exact dates of Vermeer's paintings are not known it is not clear, except in the case of the Dresden and Rijksmuseum readers (where the early Dresden picture clearly predates the Rijksmuseum picture), whether the artist extracted a detail from the larger and more complex work and reworked it as the main compositional feature of an autonomous work or, alternately, first experimented with the smaller figure and then subsequently elaborated on it in larger scale to explore its fullest expressive potential. Perhaps Vermeer explored both venues.

In any case, what is most striking in the mentioned  pairs, is that relationship between the two paintings is never merely one of subordination. Instead, Vermeer invented an brilliantly new pictorial concept for each. In the Lacemaker, for example, the figure is placed very near the viewer, giving a sense of monumentality to the humble theme of a young woman engaged in her domestic chore. Viewers are often surprised when they discover this canvas measures only 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 in. inches. The painting has a joyful energy and a sense of proximity to the observer which are foreign to the A Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.,  much larger in scale, with its nervous solemnity and  silent distances between the maid and mistress and between the mistress and viewer.

In the second pair, the young woman Vermeer depicted in The Guitar Player sparkles at the forefront of the painting. She seems literally to spill out from the bottom of the canvas onto the viewer’s space. By contrast, her counterpart in The Love Letter is frozen in a moment of doubt and anxiety isolated far from the viewer as she attempts to discover the contents of the letter which has just been delivered by her maid. Both she and her servant appear permanently frozen in reciprocal exploratory glance within a highly determined geometrical environment.