Woman Reading a Letter in an Interior

A free variation by the German genre painter Claus Meyer (1856–1919), a leading figure of the Munich school, after Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Rather than a faithful copy, it reworks the motif of a young woman absorbed in a letter into a nineteenth-century “historicizing” Dutch interior. It is signed, dated and inscribed at the upper right “Claus Meyer, Munich, ’90.” The painting is recorded by the RKD as “free after Johannes Vermeer” and has not been traced since it was auctioned in New York in 1912; it is known today only from the black-and-white reproduction in the sale catalogue.