Woman in Blue Reading a Letter

Painted around 1663–1664, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter shows a young woman standing in profile, absorbed in a letter held in both hands, lit by an unseen window at the left. She wears a loose blue jacket, and a large map hangs on the wall behind her, with two chairs and a table framing the quiet, enclosed space. Among Vermeer’s interiors the picture is unusually severe in its framing: no fragment of corner, floor, or ceiling is visible, so the figure reads against an almost abstract field of wall.

A composition built on blue

The painting is dominated by blue to a degree rare even for Vermeer. The Rijksmuseum notes that all of the other colors are secondary to its radiant lapis lazuli blue, the costly ultramarine ground from imported stone that was the most brilliant and expensive blue pigment of the age. Vermeer carried the color through the woman’s jacket, the chairs, and the cloth on the table, and rendered shadows in pale blue rather than in darker tones, lending the whole interior a cool, even light. X-radiographs show that he reworked the design, the jacket once flaring out with fur trim and the map originally extending further to the left before he tightened the arrangement.

The map on the wall

The map behind the woman depicts Holland and West Friesland, after a wall map by Balthasar Florisz. van Berckenrode first issued in 1620 and reprinted by the Blaeu publishing house. The same map appears in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. Its presence has often been read as a hint that the letter comes from a husband or lover away on a journey, though writers caution that maps were also common decorative furnishings in Dutch homes and need not carry a fixed symbolic meaning.

A pregnant woman?

The woman’s rounded silhouette has prompted a long-running debate about whether she is pregnant. Many scholars argue the shape is simply the product of mid-century Dutch fashion, which favored a bulky outline, and the costume historian Marieke de Winkel has identified the garment as a loose bed jacket worn in the morning rather than maternity dress. Because pregnancy was very rarely depicted directly in the period, the question remains open, one of several quiet ambiguities that the letter-reading theme, shared with works such as Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, tends to invite.

Restoration and the Rijksmuseum

The picture is recorded at the 1712 Pieter van der Lip sale in Amsterdam and passed through several Dutch and French collections before Adriaan van der Hoop acquired it in 1839; with his bequest it came to the City of Amsterdam and has been on loan to the Rijksmuseum since 1885. A thorough cleaning and restoration in 2010–2011 lifted layers of discolored varnish, returning the silk jacket to a far more vibrant blue and recovering details that had been lost to view, including the brass nail-heads on the foreground chair and the topography of the map under later retouching.