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A young woman stands by an open window, reading. The light falls across the page and her face. A curtain hangs at the edge of the picture, as if someone had just pulled it aside to let us look. We'll never know what the letter says. That's exactly why we can't stop looking.
Johannes Vermeer left behind only around thirty-five paintings. Letters appear in six of them.
The six letter paintings
- Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Dresden): a woman alone by the window, absorbed. A restoration completed in 2021 revealed a large painting of Cupid on the wall behind her, hidden for centuries under overpaint. - Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam): a woman in a blue jacket holds the letter close, a map on the wall behind her. - The Love Letter (Rijksmuseum): seen through a doorway, a maid hands her mistress a letter, and the two women exchange a look. - Mistress and Maid (The Frick Collection, New York): a maid interrupts with a letter, and the woman's hand drifts to her chin. - A Lady Writing (National Gallery of Art, Washington): a woman in a yellow jacket looks up from her letter, straight at us. - Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin): a woman writes intently while her maid gazes out of the window. A crumpled letter lies on the floor.
Why letters?
In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, letter writing was flourishing. Postal services were expanding, literacy was unusually high, and letters carried love, business, family news and gossip across the country and overseas. Everyone looking at these paintings understood what a letter meant: news from elsewhere, a private world entering a quiet room.
Vermeer seems to have been drawn to exactly that moment, when someone far away enters an ordinary interior through a sheet of paper. Nothing dramatic happens. A woman reads. Yet her whole inner life is suddenly in the room.
What these paintings ask of us
Look at one of them for a few minutes. Notice how still everything is, and how much that stillness holds. Then ask yourself: when did you last read something with that kind of attention? When did a few words on paper last change the air in a room for you?
That's the feeling Vermeer painted. Not the news itself, but the intimacy of receiving it.
Your own letter by the window
The Letter & Magazine subscription brings that moment into your home. Each month, a letter and a postcard arrive, written to be read slowly, with a meditation and a story about art inside, and every season, a new issue of "(meditating) On Art". Read it by the window. Vermeer would approve.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi