Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window – Poem

Afternoon light falls

on ochres and reds and pale golds.

Velvets and linens and wools

sway heavily in the light

breeze that passes through

this bower of abundance.

The letter she holds has been read before.

Pulling taut the wrinkled sheet she reads

again what she could now recite.

The word on which her gaze falls so intently

reach from the page like a familiar touch,

tender and faint as the delicate script

bleached by the light of this autumn afternoon.

Perhaps it is from an absent husband, running

the trade that brought these rugs a thousand miles,

and bought this fruit, best of harvest, for her table.

Perhaps not. It may be she who has gone away.

Given in marriage beyond what she knew to hope for,

taken from the sound of known feet on the village path,

from a circle of friends gathered to gossip

at the brookside after the day’s tasks,

from the mother who writes her now, wondering

whether, in her grand house, among her servants

and soft garments, she still cares for news from home.

Not even her mother knows how much

she cares: how she is glad that the old, blind cobbler’s

young apprentice is kind to him, and repairs

without a word the vagrant stitches on sole and tongue,

and calls him father; that her sister is learning

to weave and has taken her place reading verses

after the evening meal; that the little hunchback still rides

on the peddler’s cart and laughs back

at the children who laugh at him.

The streets of this city are silent as her ear strains

for familiar sounds. No woman’s voice summons her

in this household where, as yet, there is no babe

to cry or nurse to scold. The man who adores her

knows her only as his lady.

None of them knows how she would like, some evenings,

to lay her coiffed head on a breast broader and softer than her own;

to bake, morning, in a kitchen crowded with bowls and chatter;

to strip off her fine-stitched shoes and wade in a muddy brook

in secret, skirts gathered, with a giggling friend

in the heat and falling light of the afternoon.

In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer’s Women by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Understanding “A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window”

This painting is part of a group of works painted by Vermeer in the late 1650s which mark the start of his mature period. Other works of this period include Officer and Laughing Girl (New York, The Frick Collection), The Milkmaid (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), and The Glass of Wine (Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemaldegalerie). In these paintings the artist depicts the corner of a relatively large room which is lit through a window on the left side. This compositional formula is inspired by the work of Pieter de Hooch (upper right), who nonetheless differs from Vermeer in locating his figures closer to the foreground. Vermeer’s figures at this period are smaller than those in his earlier works, while his technique is more precise.

The figure in the background of this simple and ordered interior rests his head on his hand in a melancholy attitude, while in the foreground a young woman takes a wine glass which an elegantly dressed man hands to her. The young woman’s smile and the man’s attitude indicate that we are witnessing a scene of seduction, and that the girl is largely accepting her admirer’s advances.

Also starting at this period is a greater attention to the way in which light falls on the objects and different materials, highlighting the textures (second upper right). Along with the characteristically self-absorbed character of his figures, the most famous characteristic of Vermeer’s work is its lifelikeness, the result of a complex and exquisite exercise in the transformation of reality. Some aspects of this painting allow us to approximate the way in which the artist achieved these ends. The lower frame of the window, for example, directs the spectator’s gaze towards a chair which extends the gaze further so that we arrive at the strongly, illuminated letter which the young woman is holding. The reflection of the girl in the window emphasizes the importance of the letter, which becomes the psychological axis of the painting. As in other works by Vermeer, the chair acts to clarify the spatial relations between the elements in the room, in this case the table and the end wall. The open window which reflects the girl’s face projects a slight shadow on the wall, echoing its shape and also helping to define the location of the girl’s face. The angle of the fruit bowl and the girl’s forearm are parallel and thus visually related, so that we connect the golden sleeve of the girl with the large green curtain on the right. This type of formal relation between the elements in the painting defines its visual rhythms, which the spectator becomes aware of in a slow and gradual process.

We know from x-rays that initially the end wall, just above and to the right of the young woman, had a painting of Cupid (the same one that appears in A Lady Standing at the Virginals), but that Vermeer eliminated this element in the final composition. This image would have made it clear that the content of the letter which the woman is reading is of an amorous nature. In its initial form, the vanishing point of the perspective would have been in the center of the lower part of the painting of Cupid, which would therefore have been a very important element in the painting. It is revealing of Vermeer’s working method that when he removed the painting he did not alter the scene further, other than adding the curtain on the right to balance the visual weight of the other side of the composition. The ability to express the emotions of his figures in a particular situation is one of Vermeer’s most unique characteristics. In this case, his decision to remove the painting of Cupid from the end wall results in an exceptionally evocative scene; nothing distracts us from the painting’s message, which is the idea of communication with an absent loved one.

At the time when this painting was created in the late 1650s, Vermeer was in the process of changing his pictorial technique. Although in some earlier paintings we see the appearances of small dots of light, this technique, which functions to momentarily detain our gaze on specific areas of the painting, becomes ever more widespread in his work. The technique, which was possibly inspired by the images produced by an instrument known as a camera obscura and also has precedents in the work of artists such as Willem Kalf or Willem van Aelst would soon become one of Vermeer’s most distinctive characteristics.

The idea of including a curtain in the painting which seems to form part of the space occupied by the spectator has numerous precedents and became popular in Dutch art around the mid-17th century (lower right). This device was partially inspired by reality, as we know from inventories and from paintings of picture collections that some paintings, in particular the most important ones or those that depicted nudes, were covered with cloths.

There are also precedents for this in religious painting, indicating that curtains also added an effect of mystery and surprise to a scene, and contributed to its lifelikeness in that it confused the painted with the real space. The use of a cloth for illusionistic ends has an important classical precedent which Vermeer undoubtedly knew of Pliny the Elder’s anecdote in his Natural History in which he recounts that the Greek painter Zeuxis wished to prove his artistic superiority to his rival Parrhasius’ and thus painted some grapes which were so realistic that some birds attempted to peck at them. Parrhasius’ response was to paint a curtain over the picture which he did with such skill that Zeuxis tried to pull it back.

Alejandro Vergara, (2003) In Essential Vermeer. Retrieved April 17, 2009, from http://www.essentialvermeer.com

“The Man Who Made Vermeers” (2008)

Jonathan Lopez is the author of  The Man Who Made Vermeers (2008), a research work on Han van Meegeren and the illicit trade across Europe during the interwar period. The development of  this book took Lopez to the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain and the United States.

You will find more information on his work here. I also recommend you to read the interview with the author in Essential Vermeer.com.

Readers’ reviews:

• An Artist’s Journey. Blog by Laurel Neustadter.
• Benjamin’s Review. Goodreads.

Newspaper and magazine reviews:

• Los Angeles Times. Review by Christopher Knight.
• Chicago Tribune. Review by Wendy Smith.
• A’n'B VIBE. Review by Meghan Masterson.
• Contentions. Review by Terry Teachout.

Other reviews:

• Raincoast Books.

Audio files:

• ODEO
• ABC. Late Night Live.

Vermeer’s Corner by Graham Burchell

Apart from Katharine Weber and her book, there is another writer interested in Vermeer’s paintings. This author is Graham Burchell, poet and children’s writer well-known in England. His best tale is Chester and the Green Pig. However, I want to talk you about this author because he was also touched by the enchantment Vermeer reflected on his paintings.

Quoting Burchell:

I bought a small book of Vermeer’s paintings at a bargain price. I actually started reading it, and not just looking at the pictures. I was an art teacher for many years, but I knew very little about Johannes Vermeer. Nor does anyone else it seems. I was fascinated, firstly by the enigmatic nature of the artist and his work and secondly by the stunning beauty of his paintings. Hardly anything is known about Vermeer. He has thirty-five known paintings of which one is stolen, missing from a museum in Boston. Women and more significantly, women wearing pearls is an intriguing aspect of his work that seems to be largely about the place and plight of women in 17th century Holland. I became so absorbed by the artist, his work and his time that I resolved to write a poem about each one of his paintings. In all of the poems the speaker is a character (or in some cases – the character) in the work. This was often the woman or one of the women posing. Sometimes the woman was his wife or his daughter either talking directly to the reader or to Vermeer. Occasionally the speaker is a man. In two of the poems ‘The Procuress’ and ‘The Music Lesson’, the man in question is Vermeer himself.

Vermeer is the pinter of domestic scenes, and what Burchell tries is to paly with these themes, commenting on the details of the paintings that may have served of inspiration for the painter. More than that, in Burchell’s House of Martha and Mary, inspired by Vermeer’s painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the characters are aware of themselves as existing within the confines of a painting. Burchell uses to have is characters comment in an ironic way on the situation they are living inside these paintings.

These poems, like Vermeer’s paintings, seek to capture close, intimate moments in the lives of ordinary people. Burchell’s intention is to create a real world betyond those pictures, a world in which the characters involved express their own real feelings, withouth feeling obligingness for those characters who are part of a masterpiece. The characters in the paintings are aware that they are characters in a painting.

The unique poem available is the one on The Milkmaid. Although this is not the painting I’ve chosen, I think it is interesting for my classmates to read this alternative poem:

MILKMAID
The Milkmaid – c.1658 – 60I was going to do this in an accent
west country English
lots of ooz and arrz as burred
as sharp as blackberry thorns
or night cooled cider from a clay jug
all pickled pronouns and liberties
taken with doing words

dressed like a gert blue tit I be
what d’you wanna be painting I fer
down ‘ere with me serving bits
and pieces etcetera

but anyway I am Dutch and
you said you want to do me
with more dignity
there is grace in that simple
quiet act of pouring milk you said
strength in the straight white fall
and angle of my concentration

that makes me feel special
like a priest preparing communion
milk the wine
sincere food of devout thought
bread in a basket bread broken
rough-chin crusts snagging morning light
like chickens shaking rain

and you made this simple room
with its cool harvest tang
with its basket pail foot-warmer
nail-hooks and holes look special
the wall lit as a gargantuan pearl
I wrote it down somewhere yes
opalescent you called it

even painted a thin milk line
down my head and back said
it gives me monumental grandeur
said I was the embodiment
of the spiritual maid
and for all that sir
whatever it means I thank you.

 

Information taken from Got Poetry and from FourVolts Press

The Music Lesson, by Katharine Weber.

As part of this subject we were asked to write a piece of literary work, finding the inspiration in the painting we have chosen. However, I think I am not able to overcome Weber’s work, a writer named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996.

The Music Lesson was published in 1999, and up to now it has been published in eleven foreign languages (not in Spanish). In the words oh Katharine:

‘ve had in mind a story about a woman alone in a remote Irish cottage with a stolen painting since I first traveled to Ireland in 1976, on my honeymoon. In the tiny fishing village where we spent two rainy weeks, there was still much talk about the discovery and arrest, two years before, of the Anglo-Irish woman who had rented a local cottage in order to hide a cache of paintings stolen for ransom by the IRA from the Beit Collection in County Wicklow (a theft that made the Guinness Book of World Records for record value of stolen artworks at that time).

Among those paintings was a Vermeer. I remember tramping down a muddy lane in order to peer into the windows of what locals still called “the picture cottage.” At the time, I was intrigued by the notion of this woman in solitude at the edge of the sea with some of the great paintings of the world. Did she ever look at them, I wondered. What did they mean to her? The facts of the actual case have never been of enormous significance to me. Over the next twenty years, what stayed with me were those questions.

In 1986, my husband and I bought a little house in the same village — and I can see “the picture cottage” from my window. We spend time there with our two children in the summer, but I also spend several weeks alone in Ireland each year, and it is there that I have done some of my most concentrated writing, and it is there that I began to write The Music Lesson.

The story is then based on a true story happened on Friday, April 26, 1974, when a young woman knocked on the door of Russborough House in County Wicklow. Seconds later she was joined by three men brandishing revolvers, and together they stole 19 paintings from their frames. Among these pictures there were a Goya, three Rubens, two Gainsboroughs, and the jewel of them all, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid. The total value of the haul was set in 8 million pounds.

The pintings were early restored to their original place, but his owner, Sir Alfred Beit, gave some of these masterpieces to the National Gallery of Ireland. However, this was not the unique adventure the Vermerr’s peinting had to live, because it was stolen one more time. In 1986 Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid was stolen, and it was found in September 1993 (7 years after the robbery) in the trunk of a rented car at Antwerp AirportThe travelling Vermeer was scratched and dented.

Weber’s The Music Lesson is, then, inspired by the everyday view of that cottage rented by a thief in order to hide one of the best paintings in history. she tell the reader the story of Patricia Dolan, who is alone with a stolen Vermeer painting in an Irish cottage by the sea. How she got here is part of the story she tells; about her father, a Boston cop; the numbing loss of her daughter; and her charming Irish cousin, who has led her to this high-stakes crime.

The Music Lesson has been awarded with different honors, Among them, the New York Times Book Review Notable Book, the Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year or the Chautauqua Institution Literary Circle. selection. There are favourable critiism on the book: the New York Times says of it that it is “affecting and elegant… Weber astutely explores the gap between perception and reality”.

For further information, see http://www.katharineweber.com/books/ml_about.html

To read a good piece of criticism, see The New York Times on the Web