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Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's "Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid" Author(S): LISA VERGARA Source: Studies in the History of Art, Vol

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Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's National Gallery of Art Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's "Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid" Author(s): LISA VERGARA Source: Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 55, Symposium Papers XXXIII: Vermeer Studies (1998), pp. 234-255 Published by: National Gallery of Art Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42622610 Accessed: 11-04-2020 12:26 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42622610?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms National Gallery of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in the History of Art This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:26:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms /';-=09 )(8* =-0/'] This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:26:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LISA VERGARA City University of New York, Hunter College Antiek and Modem in Vermeeťs Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid Figuration: "twee personagien" this is so, Vermeer himself kept Lady Writing for a number of years, and the terms of the transfer suggest that his widow parted with it half his career, Vermeer produced six paint- reluctantly.3 Over half ings a his centering ings centering period on career, the iconographie of on about novelty Vermeer of the thirteen iconographie produced years, novelty six spanning paint- of The painting itself poses several basic ques- a woman with a letter, a motif commonly tions. What is the nature of the scenario? What understood as pertaining to love. Although forms of cultural rhetoric does it engage? How these pictures never functioned as a series in can we define Vermeeťs discursive strategies, a strict sense, taken together they chart the taking into account the aesthetic principles unfolding forms of his artistic thought. From through which he structures representation? the earlier three, centering on a single figure, These questions can be approached via the Vermeer moved on to explore a favorite painting-within-the-painting, The Finding of Dutch pair, mistress and maid. Analyzing Moses (Exod. 2.1 -10). The background image, theme and variation in these works can yield I propose, functions to characterize the two greater understanding of the ways in which main figures, primarily the letter writer, but the artist's famous formal manipulations also her servant. I maintain that Vermeer work expressively: for each painting he designed the biblical scene, indeed the entire invented a special decorum of scale, space, setting, the shape and the contents of the color, light, focus, and touch, keyed to the interior, to define the mistress and maid - figurai subject. Here I will discuss aspects their qualities, situation, and disposition; and of just one of these paintings, Lady Writing a that this comprehensive yet highly concen- Letter with Her Maid, probably the last of trated vision constitutes his essence as a fig- Vermeeťs painted meditations on epistolary ure painter. themes (figs. 1, 2).1 Throughout his work, Vermeer assigned Scholars generally agree that Lady Writ- unusual importance to axial relationships, ing was one of two paintings that Vermeeťs and here he directly aligned the letter writer widow, Catharina Bolnes, "sold and trans- with a woman in the biblical scene above, the ferred" to the baker Hendrick van Buyten in Madonna-like figure identifiable as Pharaoh's 1676. The painting served as partial payment daughter.4 The connective principle, rooted for a sizable debt, purportedly for bread. The in formal structure, is analogy: Madonna to i. Johannes Vermeer, Lady work in question was described in a document Egyptian princess, princess to lady writing - Writing a Letter with Her of that year as "two persons, one of whom ideal feminine types. By linking the pha- Maid (detail), c. 1670-1672, oil on canvas sits writing a letter/72 That description, raoh's daughter with the letter writer, Ver- National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin though minimal, best fits Lady Writing. If meer invites us to attribute to the modern 235 This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:26:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2. Johannes Vermeeťs paintings of epistolary subjects Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, c. 1657, oil on canvas Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, c. 1662-1664, oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam A Lady Writing, c. 1666, oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., in memory of their father, Horace Havemeyer 236 VERGARA This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:26:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mistress and Maid, c. 1667- 1669, oil on canvas Frick Collection, New York The Love Letter, c. 1668- 1672, oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, c. 1670-1672, oil on canvas National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin VERGARA 237 This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:26:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Dutchwoman essential qualities of the bibli- allows us to examine more closely the way cal personage: her solicitousness, compassion, in which the biblical personage and the letter nobility, independence. Pharaoh's daughter writer are each articulated by the artist, and thus expands the representation of Vermeeťs how they are articulated in relation to each principal figure.5 This analogy depends, of other. This procedure reveals the formal basis course, on the viewer's familiarity with the for the painting's metaphors, and it permits qualities of the Egyptian princess, which an interpretation that in no way subordinates could be deduced from the biblical account the pictorial to the textual; on the contrary, and which were expanded by Flavius Josephus it limits the textual more closely to forms, in his Jewish Antiquities, widely read in Ver-themes, and practices that are embodied not meeťs time. Pharaoh's daughter, whom Jose- just in Lady Writing but throughout Vermeer's phus calls Thermuthis, is entirely an instru- oeuvre. ment of God's tenderness - enchanted by the My conceptual sequence begins with the. child's beauty, she provides for him, adopts recognition that by including the background him as her own, and later saves him from picture in Lady Writing, Vermeer represents death. Pharaoh's daughter received further two different kinds of subject: one modern, attention in such literary works as Saint domestic, bourgeois, and secular, the other Amant's long poem, Moysé Sauvé, in which ancient, royal, scriptural. Two kinds of vision she appears as a paragon of beauty who are employed as well: the primary scene an longs for a child (Paris, 1653; issued in the illusion of filtered sunlight, palpable space, Dutch Republic seven times between 1654 and dense materiality; the secondary - the and 1 700). 6 She was also represented in Dutch painting on the wall - a representation of a painting, the Finding of Moses being the most representation, faded forms against a shad- frequently depicted incident from the life owy ground. Yet Vermeer integrates the bibli- of the prophet.7 In a few examples, a por- cal with the main scene through an elaborate trait sitter even appears in the guise of Pha- series of calculations. The composition's most raoh's daughter, evidence of her exemplary pronounced right angle, the heavy black pic- status. In Jan de Braij's version (166 1; Museum ture frame, emphatically binds mistress and Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), the sit- maid, each of them overlapping its darksome ter wears elegant contemporary clothing that, width. Implicitly, this formal linkage asso- along with her individualized features, cre- ciates the two Dutchwomen with the bibli- ates a conflation of biblical past and modish cal figures. The juxtaposed realms of the bib- present.8 lical scene and the lady's chamber are further In his monograph on Vermeer of 1981, drawn together through their similarities: in Arthur Wheelock drew a thematic connection each, the lofty space and the light-infused between the letter writer and the story of the openness at left; the stillness, even solem- Finding of Moses.9 Relating the biblical narra- nity,- the figurai shapes,- the feminine content. tive to the theme of Divine Providence (prob- The forms of the lady writing, for example, ably an old connection, made explicit nearly reverberatea in the trio of women crowning century later in an emblem book), Wheelock her in the painting above: Pharaoh's daughter reasoned that the presence of the painting- shares her special illumination,- the attendant within-the-painting might express the lady's behind the princess, like the lady, wears a iē desire that the person for whom the letter scoop-necked dress and bends forward; and is intended will have been cared for and pro- the nude curving around Moses at right gives tected." This interpretation is similar to what the biblical threesome an enclosed shape I propose - Vermeer using the biblical scene mimicking the letter writer's own.
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