As a title for a museum exhibition, “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is a spicy choice. It promises a newly intimate, possibly amorous view of an artist whose life story is filled with question marks. Although Johannes Vermeer was one of the deities of 17th-century Dutch painting, decades of scholarship have failed to unearth even such routine facts as the name of his art teacher (presuming he had one) or the identity of his models. We could be looking at his wife, his daughters, or a good-natured neighbor when we gaze at the women in his paintings, those solitary figures in quiet rooms, making lace or pouring milk into a bowl with rapt concentration.
The show brings together just three paintings, which is plenty in Vermeer’s case, especially since they share the intriguing subject of a woman who is writing a letter or receiving one, with the help of a servant. At the center of the show is the Frick’s own beloved painting, “Mistress and Maid,” (ca. 1664-67), which has been moved from its usual spot in the grand, green-wallpapered West Gallery into the brand-new Special Exhibition Galleries. There it is joined by two other Vermeer masterworks, one visiting from Dublin, the other from Amsterdam.
As its trumpet-blare of a title suggests, Vermeer’s “Love Letters” asks that we view the protagonists of the three paintings as sly correspondents caught up in romance, their maids aware of their feelings and consigned to the role of go-between.
But this is a highly speculative and iffy premise. Consider “Mistress and Maid,” one of Vermeer’s larger and more overtly dramatic paintings. A blonde housewife clad in an attractive yellow jacket trimmed in spotted white fur, glances up from her writing table, quill in hand, appearing startled. Her maidservant has entered her room to hand her an envelope — a small but commanding object, a flat, white shape gleaming against a well of shadow.
Who is the letter from? Perhaps it’s from a cousin in Amsterdam sharing news of his family’s ordeal in the bubonic plague of 1665. Or a local merchant informing the woman that her artist-husband has run up a catastrophic debt by splurging on lapis lazuli, the expensive stone that Vermeer used to achieve a radiant blue. Or perhaps the maid has jotted the note herself to announce that she is quitting her job.
Robert Fucci, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam who curated the exhibition, prefers to see the work as “courtship-themed.” Its content can be explained, he writes in the catalog, by considering the many love-letter paintings produced by Vermeer’s contemporaries. Among them was Gerard ter Borch, who is believed to have started the trend when he painted his influential “Woman Writing a Letter,” around 1655. Vermeer and others artists cribbed the motif, reminding us that art innovations often begin as a group effort, involving a generation of artists among whom credit is not always shared.
Fucci goes on to explore letter-writing customs among the general, non-art population. Dutch etiquette discouraged women from composing mash notes to their paramours; men were expected to take the lead in initiating amatory communications. But such restrictions apparently loosened in 1653, when Ovid’s “Heroides,” a collection of fictional letters by the likes of Queen Penelope from the “The Odyssey,” was translated into Dutch from Latin, providing women with a new model of epistolary freedom and self-expression. Fucci also cites Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria” (“The Art of Love”) in which, he says, “love letters were an essential component to seduction, the way to begin an affair and sustain it.”
Still, are we supposed to believe that the women in Vermeer’s paintings have nothing to think about besides men? The show is so narrowly focused on this theme that it flattens the artist into a creator of romantic suspense stories. And while it’s fun to go all Sherlock Holmes on his paintings and ponder their clues and puzzling narratives, you could do the same with countless genre painters. What makes Vermeer special is his ability to impart a nearly religious inwardness to everyday scenes. In a way, the glowing envelope in “Mistress and Maid” is a metaphor for his entire endeavor. Each of his paintings is an enclosed and sealed-off container of light.
Born in 1632 in Delft, a bustling town known for breweries and blue-and-white pottery, where he lived his entire life, Vermeer enjoyed modest success. A big fish in a small art pond, he was head of a local painter’s guild and dabbled in art dealing to support his large family. Toward the end of his life, however, French armies invaded Holland, wrecking the art market along with most everything else. Vermeer was in debt when he died at 43.
For two centuries, his work was blanketed in obscurity. It wasn’t until the later 19th-cenutry that the art critic Theophile Thoré encountered Vermeer’s work on his travels in Holland and wrote a three-part article proclaiming him an overlooked genius. By then, “the sphinx of Delft,” as Thoré dubbed him, was indeed an enigma, his correspondence and sales records and other papers scattered to the winds. No accounts of his personality or work habits were recorded by his contemporaries.
Perhaps only an artist about whom so little is known could spawn so much copy chronicling his life. In the past generation, he has inspired an opera; a novel that became a film in which Scarlett Johansson plays a demure maid-model posing for the painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring”; and an ever-growing research industry that has set well-respected scholars at loggerheads over the meaning of his work. Some of the research reflects an academic fashion for locating meaning in art patronage and economic history rather than in individual objects. The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his forthcoming “Vermeer,” focuses on the artist’s major patron, the collector Maria de Knuijt, who was known to have purchased about half of his work and generously left him 500 guilders in her will. Graham-Dixon, bypassing the love-letter route, argues instead that Vermeer tailored his paintings to de Knuijt’s spiritual beliefs.
De Knuijt also receives fresh attention in the coming book, “Closer to Vermeer: New Research on the Painter and His Art,” which emphasizes the artist’s sympathy to women. The book is intended as an epilogue to the Vermeer blockbuster at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 2023, the largest-ever assembly of his paintings. (It brought together 28 works from his famously small corpus of 37 known paintings and included the three works currently in the show at the Frick.)
Still, there’s no such thing as spending too much time with Vermeer, and the Frick show offers a rare chance to reconvene with prized works. The smallest painting, “Love Letter,” on loan from Amsterdam, measures just 17 x 15 inches. (Don’t attach deep meaning to its title, a 20th-century add-on, like Vermeer’s titles generally.) It takes you into a dim, cluttered hallway, where, through the frame of an open doorway, you see a room with black and white floor tiles receding in space. A woman holding a stringed instrument — who’s uncharacteristically goofy, her eyes rolled upward to expose their whites as she chats with her maid — pales in interest beside the painting’s musical play of rectangles-within-rectangles. You find your thoughts wandering to the pristine grids of Vermeer’s 20th century Dutch descendant, Piet Mondrian.
The other loan, “Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid,” (ca. 1670-2), a stunning composition in muffled earth tones, comes from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. An olive-green curtain on the left is pulled back, revealing the corner of a room in which a lady seated at a rug-covered table, gripping a quill pen near its tip, is busy writing. A shaft of light from the window falls on the puffed sleeve of her blouse, which has a muscular largeness about it. In the foreground, small objects are scattered on the floor: a stick of sealing wax, a red seal, and a crumpled sheet of paper, perhaps a discarded first draft? A maid waiting in the corner is equally forceful as a personality, and perhaps captures the patience it requires to be around creative people. Averting her eyes from the lady and glancing out the window, she could be thinking, “How long can it take to write one letter?”
Considered together, the three paintings in the current show alert us to the artist’s desire to view a scene from different vantage points. I was fascinated to realize that from one picture to the next, Vermeer is variously standing far, less far, or not far at all from his female subjects. Compared to the “The Love Letter,” with its room-behind-a-room vista of the two women, or the Dublin painting, which positions you forever outside the dividing green curtain, the Frick’s “Mistress and Maid” admits you directly into the room with the figures, who are almost life-size, as if the artist pressed the zoom button on a camera. He is believed to have used lenses and other optical devices to compose his paintings, as the artist David Hockney and others have argued persuasively.
A few steps forward, a few steps back — Vermeer, in his quest to master perspective, clearly spent a good deal of time shuffling around rooms with a black-and-white checkerboard floor. He gives you a lucid, seemingly ruler-perfect sense of the way daylight looks indoors, and invites you to look along with him. That might not sound like anything to swoon over. But that’s fine, because swooning requires that you close your eyes and miss seeing the picture.
Vermeer’s Love Letters
Through Aug. 31 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, at Fifth Avenue; 212-288-0700; frick.org.
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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