15 I Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657–59) in Dresden is familiar throughout the world (fig. 1). Following its recent restoration, which has significantly altered its appearance, it is still as admired, revered, and cherished a work of art as it had been for centuries in its previous state.2 The suggestive allure of this painting is explained by Vermeer’s extraordinary artistic ability to render everyday scenes in impressively lifelike detail. Dresden’s Girl Reading a Letter is the first in a string of works, made from the late 1650s onwards, in which Vermeer created interiors peopled with lone figures or small groups and presented the cultivated occupations of an elegant Dutch upper-middle class with seemingly perfect realism. The ostensibly true-to-life depiction of everyday life in the Republic of the United Netherlands constituted a particular form of bourgeois genre painting in the middle and second half of the 17th century. With unprecedented technical perfection, attention to detail, refinement, and ingenuity, painters such as Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard Dou, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and – most notably – Johannes Vermeer produced scenes of bourgeois life with a convincing illusion of reality. However, when Vermeer’s paintings are compared with those of his fellow artists, it is clearly evident how much they differ (fig. 2).3 With their profound serenity, harmony, and concentration, Vermeer’s interiors featuring a solitary figure go far beyond the narrative-drive, sometimes anecdotal works by his contemporaries, and usually carry a more strongly symbolic or allegorical meaning. As we now know since the recently completed restoration, this is particularly true of the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Since the exposure of the Cupid picture on the rear wall of the room, it has become abundantly clear that in this work, as in several other of his paintings, Vermeer has woven a statement about love into a seemingly innocuous everyday situation. Uta Neidhardt “... une Jeune fille qui lit vis à vis d’une fenêtre ...” 1 The Painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Johannes Vermeer in Dresden Following Its Restoration between 2017 and 2020 Fig. 2 Pieter de Hooch, Woman Weighing Coins c. 1664, oil on canvas, 61 × 53 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 141B Fig. 1 Johannes Vermeer Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window c. 1657–59, oil on canvas, 83 × 64.5 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, inv. no. 1336
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