"Masterpieces from the World's Museums in the Hermitage"
Jan Vermeer: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
from the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
25 September 2001 - 16 December 2001

Hall 253 of the New Hermitage

The painting Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1662-64) is a celebrated masterpiece by Jan Vermeer. The work represents a genre popular in the 17th century and known as "rebus painting" in which a love letter sets the plot and a map of Holland provides a "key" to the interpretation of the whole scene.

Vermeer produced a large number of paintings on the "love letter" theme: Lady Reading a Letter (1657, Gemëldegalerie, Dresden), Lady Writing a Letter (1665-67, National Gallery, Washington), Lady and Her Maid with a Letter (1666-67, Frick Collection, New York), The Love Letter (1669-70, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Lady Writing a Letter, with Her Maid (1670, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin). In them he presented the idea of the harmonious unity of loving hearts, inviting the 17th-century viewer to look on love as a whole-hearted feeling that could really be achieved, a loyalty producing the capacity to wait and hope under the protection of Divine Providence.

The pregnancy of the "Woman in Blue" is evidence that she has travelled the conventional path from betrothal to legal marriage sanctified by the Church (her future motherhood lends even more poetry to her state. The unshakeable pillars of the Dutch burgher lifestyle were considered to be hearth and home, a faithful wife, a large number of children, frugal management of household affairs and patriotism - the map of the Dutch province of South Holland, where - in the city of Delft - Vermeer worked all his life, symbolizes the concepts of "homeland" and "mother country". The ideal in the "code of honour" for the whole of Dutch society was amor patriae - love of one's country.

Public appreciation of the legacy of paintings left by Jan Vermeer emerged only in the middle of the 19th century. At present we know of thirty-five works by the artist. Having been put up for auction seven times between 1712 and 1825, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter was for a time in England in the possession of John Smith, a connoisseur of Dutch art, from whom it was purchased in 1839 by Adriaen van der Hoop (1778-1854), a patron of the arts and collector of Dutch 17th-century paintings who bequeathed his entire collection to the state.

The exhibition of Vermeer's masterpiece has been organized under an agreement on the exchange of paintings between the Hermitage and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
Circa 1662-64
Larger view