Femme lisant une lettre gabriel metsu biography
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File:Woman Reading a Letter brush aside Gabriël Metsu.jpg
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The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue
Critical assessment
Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter seems so harmonious in color, theme and mood that it is hard to imagine any other compositional solution. Indeed, as in others of his paintings, one has difficulty imagining Vermeer at work, as an artist who had to somehow compose and make tangible a concept he had conceived in his mind. Part of the problem in visualizing Vermeer's working procedure stems from the lack of available information. No drawings, prints or unfinished paintings-indeed, no records of commissions-offer clues to his intent or aspects of his working process.
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, 1995
The signature
No signature appears on this work.
(Click here to access a complete study of Vermeer's signatures.)
Dates
1662–1665
Albert Blankert, Vermeer: 1632–1675, 1975
c. 1663–1664
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., The Public and the Private in the Age of Vermeer, London, 2000
c. 1663–1664
Walter Liedtke, Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008
c. 1662–1665
Wayne Franits, Vermeer, 2015
(Click here to access a complete study of the dates of Vermeer's paintings).
Technical report
The support is a fine, plain-weave linen with a t
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Woman Reading a Letter (Metsu)
Painting by Gabriël Metsu
Woman Reading a Letter is an oil painting by Dutch artist Gabriël Metsu, created c. 1665–1667, shortly before his death. During his lifetime, under the Golden Age of Dutch painting, Metsu was a renowned painter, much better known than Vermeer.[1] This painting is assumed to be a pair with Man Writing a Letter.
The pair of paintings are regarded as some of Metsu's best-known works; Metsu got the idea of a pair of themed paintings from Gerard ter Borch, who had painted a similar pair. It has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, since 1987.
Description
[edit]A woman is reading a letter, seated by a window with a blue curtain. She is dressed elegantly in a yellow jacket with an expensive collar of ermine, and a skirt of peach-colored silk; there is gold trim on both the skirt and the elegant shoe she has kicked off.[2] The red and blue embroidery pillow on her lap and the sewing basket next to her show that she put her needlework aside to read the letter. Beside her, a maid in dark clothing is drawing aside a curtain in front of a painting of a naval scene in an ebony frame. Visual clues would have made it immediately apparent to Metsu's contemporaries tha