A woman sits on the right, clad in a fur-trimmed yellow coat, a pearl dangling from her visible ear. One hand touches her chin, while the other grasps a writing utensil. A hairpiece contains her golden tresses, though some spring around her face in tight ringlets. Her attire, along with the veneered box and the silver-and-glass writing set on the table before her, conveys wealth.
To the right, a second figure emerges from the shadows, with an epistle in her hands that stands out before her less vibrant garb, which is drab and dowdy compared to that of her mistress. Though the mistress’ expression is inscrutable, as most of her face is hidden, her inner life is paramount in this painting. “It’s that moment of emotional frisson, that sense of anticipation, that expectation, that’s heightened in this moment,” curator and seventeenth-century Dutch art scholar Robert Fucci, the mind behind “Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick, said at the press preview for the exhibition.
We can’t be certain who wrote the letter or what it contains, but according to Fucci, the woman in yellow is presumably engaging in an affair or courtship. There exists both respect and a sense of privacy between her and her maidservant, underlined by Vermeer’s once-green but now-darkened curtain in the background. The maid is privy to feelings and happenings in her mistress’ life, of which others in her orbit are likely ignorant.
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Mistress and Maid was the last painting Henry Clay Frick acquired—in 1919 after gathering an impressive array of masterworks in his Fifth Avenue Gilded Age mansion—but the first of the exhibit’s three painted by Johannes Vermeer between 1664 and 1667. The other two works in “Vermeer’s Love Letters” are also woman-centered domestic scenes involving epistolary exchange, on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, respectively.
The theme of letter-writing has long been a staple in art and literature, representing human connection, moving narratives forward and creating emotional tension. Its resonances range in place and time across the canon, from John Callcott Horsley’s Morning of St. Valentine to Eldzier Cortor’s The Night Letter or Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. There is something intimate and intriguing about the exchange: the act of pouring feelings onto paper, the moving from hand to hand and the receipt of news or sentiment.
A now iconic painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer lived from 1632 to 1674. Frick curator Aimee Ng, who studied with Fucci at Columbia, said that Vermeer “was basically forgotten in art history for 200 years. Today, Vermeer is an artist we cannot get enough of. We’ve had really crowded galleries since reopening after a five-year closure. The last time we’ve had this many people here was in 2013 when the star Mauritshuis picture, Girl with a Pearl Earring, was at the Frick and we had lines around the block.”
With the Frick exhibiting a temporary trifecta showcasing Vermeer’s treatment of the theme (along with Officer and Laughing Girl and Girl Interrupted at Her Music at the foot of their grand staircase) and five works by the artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ng noted that nearly a third of Vermeer’s extant oeuvre of thirty-six paintings is currently in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
In the Rijksmuseum’s The Love Letter, the viewer becomes a voyeur, looking on from a separate room, as both figures are framed by a passage. The composition captures a similar emotional peak, the maid having just interrupted her mistress playing the cittern to hand her this missive. Among the domestic ephemera surrounding them—a map, sheets of music, a cloth sloped on a chair—the mistress and maid’s brightness and expressions engage us.
The new Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Gallery, which is hosting “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” has been kept minimalist so that the paintings can speak for themselves. Captions are printed on a protruding block on the left wall. Installing the three canvases side-by-side provides a sense of dimensionality, as each work, differing in size and frame, interacts with the others.
The exhibit’s third painting, the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid, gives the mistress and maid equal visual weight. The seated woman pens a letter, while her maid gazes pensively out the window. According to Fucci, these opposing activities build a sense of time in the image. Behind them hangs a biblical painting of the Finding of Moses. Toward the front of the painting, a red seal, a stick of sealing wax and paper litter the floor. The image, with its almost novelistic quality, is open to various interpretations. “These paintings give us a chance to fill in the blanks,” he said.
Interestingly, the provenance of Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid have long been settled, but the chain of ownership of The Love Letter was less clear until recently. A document drawn up following Vermeer’s death suggests that his widow gave two paintings to the master baker of Delft to settle a debt of 600 guilders. She included a buyback stipulation in the hope that she could reclaim, as they were “dear to her,” Fucci said. The National Gallery of Ireland’s Vermeer was one of them, and it has recently been proposed that the second was The Love Letter—described in the document as “a woman playing a cittern”—rather than The Guitar Player in Kenwood House in London.
“Vermeer’s Love Letters” is on view at the Frick through August 31, 2025.
