A Lady Writing

From 1 November to 18 December 2016, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, presented a focused loan display of Vermeer's A Lady Writing (c. 1665), drawn from the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The six-week showing was made possible by a longstanding partnership between the two institutions. Chrysler director Erik Neil described viewing a Vermeer in person as “never an everyday experience,” and chief curator Lloyd DeWitt praised the painter's “meticulous care in composition and pose.” Admission to the display was free.

The painting depicts a young woman pausing mid-letter at a table draped in a deep blue cloth, her gaze turned outward toward the viewer as she holds a quill pen. Vermeer rendered her yellow jacket trimmed in white ermine using lead-tin-yellow, one of the expensive pigments he favoured in his middle period, and set her against a dark, undefined background that focuses attention entirely on her figure and its warm light. A pearl necklace lies close to the pen, a detail that subtly underscores the amorous register of letter-writing in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. The Chrysler display placed the work in the context of the museum's own Dutch and Flemish holdings, allowing visitors to compare it with related works from the same tradition.

The National Gallery of Art holds three Vermeers in total, and loans of any of them to partner institutions are infrequent. The Chrysler, located approximately 190 miles south of Washington, offered Norfolk audiences direct access to one of the finest small-scale paintings in American public collections. The showing attracted considerable local attention and was among the most significant Old Master loans the museum had received in recent years.