Getty Voices: The Power of Vermeer

Getty Museum curator Anne Woollett, a specialist in Dutch painting, is our guide to the enigmatic power of Vermeer

By Anne T. Woollett

Feb 19, 2013

Social Sharing

Editor’s Note

Throughout 2013, the Getty community participated in a rotation-curation experiment using the Getty Iris, Twitter, and Facebook. Each week a new staff member took the helm of our social media to chat with you directly and share a passion for a specific topic—from museum education to Renaissance art to web development. Getty Voices concluded in February 2014.

Body Content

One of the most exhilarating—perhaps even the most exhilarating—experience after months of planning and envisioning a new configuration of paintings in a gallery is the instant when the long-awaited new arrival takes its place on the wall and becomes a catalyst, changing how we perceive perfectly familiar paintings.

Sometimes with breathtaking immediacy, and sometimes more incrementally, the relationships between works are transformed, and individual characteristics emerge or recede in response.

On Saturday, when Vermeer’s exquisite Woman in Blue Reading a Letter took her place in the center of our large gallery of Dutch paintings, rearranged for the occasion, the impact was intriguingly complex: she seemed calmly at home, while simultaneously introducing a strong, distinctive new presence.

Painting of a woman in a blue frock, standing beside a shadowed table and chairs, reading a letter

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, about 1663–64, Johannes Vermeer. Oil on canvas, 18 5/16 x 15 3/8 in. (49.6 x 40.3 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)

The highly structured, almost geometric quality of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is even more apparent here than in Amsterdam, where I last saw it in the Rijksmuseum’s conservation studio. We know that Vermeer adjusted the contours of the woman’s jacket and the left vertical edge of the map to achieve the compelling balance between fields of the white wall, strong horizontals such as the map rail, and the solid vertical of the woman in blue herself. Unlike its home environment at the Rijksmuseum, which includes three other works by Vermeer (shown below), the clarity and insistence of the composition has no parallel in the works of Vermeer’s contemporaries hanging nearby here at the Getty.

Composite of three paintings. To the left a 3-story brick building with a woman in the doorway. At center is a milkmaid pouring milk. At right is a seated woman with a lute and another woman behind.

The collection of the Rijksmuseum includes four paintings by Vermeer. From left: View of Houses in Delft (“The Little Street”), 1658; The Milkmaid, 1660; The Love Letter, 1669

By comparison, Jan Steen’s The Drawing Lesson, which hangs to the left of the Woman in Blue, seems messy and far less serene than before (appropriate to the subject and the painter of brilliant wit), while the quiet interiority of the elegantly dressed young woman in Gerard Ter Borch’s The Music Lesson resonates clearly with his friend Vermeer’s sensibility.

Observing the striking monumentality of Woman in Blue, a colleague remarked, “the composition is so powerful—almost abstract, it would even look beautiful hanging upside down!”

As the painting settles in for the first week of her six-week stay with us, I’ll be examining the power of Vermeer from a variety of angles (though not upside down).


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