101 The edges of the painting Uncovered in the second stage of the restoration, the edges of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window suggest that the functional context of the Dresden painting was different from that of other Vermeer paintings. Since the aforementioned findings1 on the approximately 2.5-centimetre-wide edges are very heterogeneous, it remains a matter of speculation whether any of the possibilities presented below can explain these strips at the margins. The broad edges, which contain unfinished pictorial elements whose development was evidently broken off at different stages of the painting process, may have been part of the compositional scheme as it was originally conceived. It is possible that they reveal developmental stages of the underpainting which played no further role in the execution of the painting – perhaps because by then they had already been covered over. The foot of a large roemer glass in the bottom right-hand corner,2 which came to light when the layers of overpainting were removed, also raises the question of why the glass had been positioned so close to the lower edge of the painting. When the painting was placed in a decorative frame, as was customary, the foot of the glass would definitely have been covered by the frame rebate at the lower edge. The tension garlands on the canvas, however, would seem to indicate that the picture support cannot have been significantly trimmed.3 The question therefore arises as to whether the roemer glass might have been part of a different, discarded composition. Christoph Schölzel Daniel Lordick Christoph Herm Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window in a Peepshow Box – an Experiment Main motifs When attempting to determine the functional context of the painting, it is logical to take the motifs used in the painting as the starting point: The main motif, that of the girl reading the letter, is not so dissimilar to other Vermeer genre paintings as to suggest that its intended display context differed significantly from that of comparable paintings by the same artist. The motif of the open window on the left also appears in four other interiors painted by Vermeer. It is hardly conceivable that the window extended into the broad border strip on the lefthand side. The table with the fruit bowl, as well as the Spanish chair in the foreground, which had already been created with a reserve,4 function(ed) as a pictorial barrier. This separation of the foreground from the main scene was a technique used by Vermeer in other works from the same period, albeit in a way that filled a much larger portion of the pictorial space, for example in The Procuress (1656, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) and A Maid Asleep (c. 1656/57, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); these two paintings do not, however, feature painted strips at the margins comparable to that of the Girl Reading a Letter. A further motif is the green curtain, which, with its fringes and the row of holes at the upper hem, is clearly meant to give the impression of a real-size picture curtain, even if some authors have interpreted it as part of the scene and as being actually located in the corner of the girl’s room.5 The intended illusionism of the curtain has since been established beyond doubt as a result of observations made in a life-size reproduction of the pictorial situation carried out in collaboration with the Dresden University of Fine Arts.6 The quasi extra- pictorial curtain links the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window with numerous paintings by contemporaries of Vermeer, many of whom adorned archiFig. 1 Watching Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window in the peep-box, Jørgen Wadum on September 9, 2021
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