Jan Vermeer, The Love Letter, 1666, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  17” x 15”.

Here’s some Renaissance lute music to accompany this painting.

We’re snooping again.  We’ve walked in the house, where perhaps we shouldn’t be, and are looking through a doorway, at a young woman and her maid.  They would not be happy to see us.  Someone has pulled aside the curtain that protects the privacy of this brightly lit room.  We look through the frame within a frame over the tiled floor – the tiles laid to draw us across the floor – to the back of the room.  The action in this picture is in the background, not the foreground or the middle as is typical in a painting.  So skillful is the construction that after a minute we feel we’re standing next to the women.  Clever, this Vermeer.

The maid has just brought in a letter. The letter’s sudden arrival has caught the two unprepared.  A laundry basket, a broom, and the slippers are dropped in the entry. Although the letter isn’t opened yet, we’ll guess it’s a love letter.  Why else the grin on the maid’s face and the questioning, slightly alarmed look on the lady’s face? 

She’s been playing the lute, popular in the 17^th century, and an instrument a well brought up young lady might learn to play, much as 150 years later Elizabeth Bennett and her future sister in law learned to play the piano.  The lute is the instrument of love.  Vermeer’s contemporaries – Frans Hals for one – painted lute players in bars and brothels.  In Dutch, the word for lute was also slang for vagina.  (Angels could play heavenly music on a lute, but I think we can safely dismiss any idea that we’re dealing with angels here.)

Maids, in literature, art and the popular imagination, were sexually available, served as go betweens, comic figures, a fifth column with regard to the household walls, and were easily corruptible.  Being typically illiterate, they made good mail carriers.  We can imagine a young bourgeois writing his love letter and entrusting it to an illiterate servant who only moments ago put it into the hands of this maid.

The lady wears a yellow dress:  here we can associate yellow with happiness.  A pearl necklace, jewels in her earrings and more jewels in her hair cap confirm she’s dressed up for visitors and from a wealthy family.  The slippers lying on the floor and the stormy scene in the picture above the pair’s heads may also be suggestive:  the hastily discarded slippers suggest illicit love and the storm of a tempestuous affair or an angry father.  In Dutch slang of the period living together was called “living over the broom.”

Preachers and moralists in 17^th century Holland told their countrymen and women that women’s virtue and purity were a foundation of the republic.  If other women were like these two, the state tottered.

We can speculate for hours about what’s in the letter.  Perhaps a proposal for an assignation, or a thank you for a wonderful evening?  A request for permission to talk her father?  Or, maybe worse, termination of an already well advanced relationship?

Let’s move on.  I can’t imagine Frans Hals painting in the same style.  (See previous post).  He’d never have the patience to paint the clothes draped over the chair (lower right), the sheet music tossed on the seat, or the designs on the fabric, and so on.  Vermeer painted details with care and affection, with the same attention he expended on his models’ moods and expressions.  The brush strokes are not visible, or hardly visible, while Hals’ strokes are easy to see, even in a web-reproduction.

Vermeer painted with great confidence.  The wall behind the women is full of interest:  the paintings, the tapestry or wood work on the wall, the fireplace and carving on lintel, but we hardly notice them and are not distracted from the story about to unfold. 

I’m left with my curiosity:  I want to know what’s going to happen.