Published in conjunction with the special focus exhibition marking the long-awaited reopening of the Frick Collection, Robert Fucci’s Vermeer’s Love Letters reflects the aims of the show it accompanies. The exhibition, curated by Fucci, offered a rare opportunity to study three of Vermeer’s paintings that feature a letter writer and her maid – whom the curator aptly describes as a trusted go-between charged with conveying intimate messages between the lady of the house (juffrouw) and her beloved.

The decision of the Frick Collection to celebrate its reopening to the public with this focus exhibition is easy to understand, especially in the wake of the 2023 blockbuster exhibition in Amsterdam, billed as the largest gathering of Vermeer’s works ever assembled. Given the small number of paintings securely attributed to this artist, even a show that brings together only three of them is a notable achievement. The largest among them, Mistress and Maid (c. 1664–67) from the Frick’s own collection, is a marvel of psychological subtlety. Vermeer captures the instant when the maid delivers a letter seemingly just as the mistress is about to write her own. As in so many of his finest works, Vermeer transforms a scenario familiar from so many paintings by his contemporaries into an intimate moment of human experience.

The two paintings on loan – the Love Letter (c. 1669–70) from the Rijksmuseum and Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid (c. 1670–72) from the National Gallery of Ireland – complement the work from the Frick Collection beautifully. All three of them show essentially the same protagonists in three closely related versions of a narrative on love and longing – and the crucial role of letters in communicating feelings between people who cannot be together.

The smallest of these three paintings in terms of its format, from the Rijksmuseum, is also arguably one of Vermeer’s less successful letter-themed paintings – in part because of the unusually dense array of potentially metaphorical objects: paintings-within-paintings that possibly hint at the lady’s emotions, a basket of linen by her side as a sign of female virtue, a cittern alluding to love and longing, a pulled tapestry curtain announcing the theatricality of the “scene” we observe, as if through a half-open door, and so on. This profusion of attributes takes away from the most important element of this composition – that moment of exchange between the lady and the maid. The third painting, from the National Gallery in Ireland, is far more restrained in comparison, though no less rich in narrative potential.

Art historians have long recognized the importance of letter writing, reading, and receiving in Vermeer’s oeuvre. By presenting three of his six letter-themed compositions, this exhibition offered an especially valuable opportunity to consider them as a group independently of his other work. As Fucci explains his choice, while Vermeer’s other depictions of letter writing involve solitary women, these three feature an interaction between the lady of the house and her maid, which creates a sense of “narrative motion” and a “greater interpretive space for the emotions at play” (13).

Fucci develops his argument through several thematically organized chapters. The first examines the broader popularity of letter-themed imagery in seventeenth-century Dutch art and situates Vermeer’s paintings in relation to those of his contemporaries The second chapter turns to household servants, offering a brief but informative overview of their social status, the prejudices they faced, and – most relevantly in the context of these paintings – their real and imagined roles in delivering messages between mistresses and lovers. This discussion is enriched by references to contemporary imagery and texts concerning the perceptions of maids in Dutch society In addition, by bringing in documents related to the maid employed in Vermeer’s own household, Fucci reminds us that even moments of apparent privacy like those evoked in these paintings are embedded in a world of complex personal and social relationships.

The third chapter, titled “Modern Love,” addresses the gendered norms governing letter writing, as exemplified by works of some of Vermeer’s closest contemporaries, such as Gerard Ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu. While these comparisons are justified and illuminating, they also highlight Vermeer’s ability to transcend the formulaic tendencies that characterize the works of even his most accomplished peers.

Fucci’s most compelling line of inquiry in this portion of the book involves the possible relevance of Ovid’s famous manual for courtship Ars Amatoria and the collection of imaginary love letters by female characters from classical mythology known as the Heroides. The popularity of these works in seventeenth-century Holland was attested by a number of editions; the one singled out by Fucci here is the free adaptation of Ars Amatoria by the poet and writer Jacob Westerbaen (1599-1660), which also comments on the role of maids in preserving lovers’ secrets.

In the final chapter, “Discretion,” Fucci expands the discussion of this literary context to include Letters of a Portuguese Nun, a collection of passionate epistles of a woman seduced and abandoned by an officer, published in Paris in 1669. Like Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Heroides, this text enjoyed a wide popularity in Holland, appearing in a Dutch edition merely few months after its initial publication. While Fucci does not necessarily argue for a direct influence of these literary works on Vermeer’s, he is right to emphasize the way in which they reflect a “transformative moment in the cultural history of emotional expression in Europe” (68). The three catalogue entries that follow are, like the book as a whole, well researched, concise, and clearly written.

Overall, Vermeer’s Love Letters exemplifies how museum publications can move beyond standard exhibition catalogues. Compact yet substantive, it offers an illuminating study of an important pictorial theme in seventeenth-century Dutch art and a meaningful contribution to Vermeer scholarship, which remains dominated by more traditional catalogues. Although written for a broad audience, Fucci’s analysis of the visual, literary, and social contexts of these works will be of considerable interest to scholars and museum professionals.

Yet returning from Fucci’s rich contextual discussion to the paintings themselves only heightens one’s awareness of Vermeer’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis his contemporaries. Is this difference only a function of his uncommon sensitivity to formal arrangements, tonal harmonies, or light and shadow, which make the beholders more attentive to what may truly matter the most in an image – both those elements and aspects that are seen, and those that are merely implied? Even as we may agree that his works – like those of Ter Borch and Metsu, for instance – are thoroughly informed by broader cultural interests and expectations about social and personal relationships, he always seems to be thinking differently, making us see even the most familiar and cliché of scenes as a human experience worthy of reflection.

One last question raised by both the exhibition and this book relates to the chronology of these three paintings. Fucci accepts the dates assigned by the institutions that own them, an understandable choice. Even so, it remains difficult to imagine that these closely related compositions were produced over an eight-year span – from the Frick painting’s earliest proposed date of 1664 to the latest proposed date of 1672 for the painting from the National Gallery in Ireland. Once again, it is important to note that out of Vermeer’s six paintings inspired by the epistolary culture, these are the only ones featuring two participants – the upper-class lady and her maid. Seeing them together, as this focus show at the Frick Collection allowed us to do, without any other of Vermeer’s works or those by his contemporaries, makes them seem even more like three moments of the same unfolding narrative.

Though the two recurring characters may look slightly different in each painting, they are almost certainly based on the same two models. Did Vermeer paint these compositions in sequence, with multi-year intervals between each? Or did he work on them intermittently, returning periodically – as he often did – to refine and adjust, and perhaps pare down certain elements of the composition, as he typically did? Given this tendency, why does he add so many objects with symbolic meanings in the smallest of these three works, the Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum – generally dated between the Frick Collection painting and the one from Dublin? As with so many other aspects of Vermeer’s work, these questions deserve additional consideration – and will continue to prompt other writers to offer their own interpretations, beyond this thoughtful and engaging book.

Aneta Georgievska-Shine
University of Maryland, College Park