Woman Reading a Letter in an Interior

A free variation by the German genre painter Claus Meyer (1856–1919), a figure of the Munich school, after Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Rather than a faithful copy, it reworks Vermeer’s motif of a young woman absorbed in a letter, and the RKD catalogues it not as a reproduction but as “free after Johannes Vermeer.” It is signed, dated and inscribed at the upper right “Claus Meyer, Munich, ’90,” placing the work in 1890.

A nineteenth-century interior

Where Vermeer’s original of about 1662–1665, now in the Rijksmuseumin Amsterdam, sets its reader against a bare plaster wall hung with a map, Meyer transposes the scene into what the RKD describes as a “Dutch historicizing interior.” A standing young woman holds the letter and reads, dressed in a house jacket, with a chair, a table, a curtain and a framed landscape painting on the wall around her. The picture belongs to the later nineteenth-century taste for evoking the Dutch Golden Age, a vogue to which Munich painters such as Meyer contributed.

Lost since 1912

The canvas, oil on canvas measuring about 65 by 52 cm, passed through the New York art dealer Hermann Schaus and his William Schaus Galleries, and was sold at the American Art Association in New York in 1912. It has not been traced since, and is known today only from the black-and-white reproduction recorded in the sale catalogue.