Woman Reading a Letter

A young woman stands at a table reading a letter, still wearing the blue jacket worn only at home. The Rijksmuseum points out what that tells us: the letter is personal, since business letters were usually read in the study.

Every other colour gives way to the blue of that jacket. It comes from lapis lazuli, an expensive semi-precious stone; Vermeer was far from wealthy, yet he used it often. The shadows are even more unusual: the museum notes he painted her skin with pale grey and the shadows on the wall with light blue.

Where does the light come from? There's no window in sight. In Vermeer's paintings, the museum says, light almost always falls from an unseen window to the left of the frame — the soft blue shadow on the wall is the evidence. The map behind her isn't incidental either: it is a 1620 map of Holland and West Friesland that appears in several of his paintings.

The painting hasn't always looked like this. The 2010–11 restoration showed that the jacket was originally wider, perhaps with a fur collar, and, more importantly, brought back the original colours. Our view: Vermeer's genius isn't realism but the nerve to leave things out — the window, the words of the letter, the extra fabric — until only a woman and the lines she is reading remain.