This week, The Frick Collection opened “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” an intellectual summer snack of a show running through August 31, 2025, that unites the museum’s Mistress and Maid (c.1664-67), with the Rijksmuseum’s Love Letter (c.1669-1670) and the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid (c.1670-1671). There are generally accepted to be only thirty-six extant paintings by Johannes Vermeer, so any assemblage of them is significant, and this show marks a great opportunity to visit the building following its major renovation, which “moves the Frick squarely into the 21st Century and seamlessly solves multifarious problems,” per Michael Kimmelman. We caught up with Dr. Robert Fucci, who curated the exhibition, to tell us more about Vermeer’s epistolary emotions.

Vermeer’s paintings are known for their subtle data-rich details. Can you speak to the contemporary attitudes about letters and what they would have signified for a viewer in his time?

Letters in the context of these paintings would have signified to the viewer that there was love or courtship involved. The presence of the maid is especially important because it would have signaled to the viewer that this was possibly a secret exchange. This raises a host of narrative possibilities, especially in terms of the emotions involved and the maid’s role as someone privy to the feelings being played out on both ends of the affair.

What makes Mistress and Maid such an important work?

This appears to be the earliest of the three paintings in which Vermeer chose to explore the letter theme with both the lady and the maid. There are a couple of notable features about this work. One is just our viewpoint, since this is the largest of the three works and contains the largest scale figures. This brings us closer to the figures as the emotions play out. Especially touching is the way in which the lady is holding the pen as it hovers above the sheet. She is in the process of thinking rather than writing, a beautifully subtle touch about the difficulty of finding words. Also note that the maid has just ‘popped in’ from the other side of the curtain (which is now difficult to see due to the darkened paint), which the viewer should understand as a place of privacy, the curtain having been used to cordon off a space for the contents of the letter to be thought out and written. That she receives a letter as she is writing lends a certain narrative drama, and Vermeer has brilliantly registered a slight concern in her bearing by bringing her hand gently to her chin.

What should viewers know about the other two works brought to the Frick from the Rijksmuseum and National Gallery of Ireland?

These are highly interesting variants on the same letter and maid theme, too rich in detail to sum up easily, but in short: the painting from the Rijksmuseum brilliantly positions us as an ‘active’ viewer in the painting by making our vantage point a voyeuristic one: we gaze through a darkened doorway from another room. The exchange of expressions between the lady and maid in this case is quite remarkable, and (I would argue) adds a slight element of humor. The Dublin painting is likewise a brilliant work, but note that Vermeer has once again decided to experiment with vantage point and composition. Here, the concentrated energy of the lady writing the letter becomes the central artistic concern, which is furthered by the maid looking away out the window, giving her mistress the time and space to write freely.

These works strike me as distinctly feminist, for the inner life they’ve granted women at the time. What was Vermeer’s relationship with women like?

A case can be made that Vermeer was indeed feminist avant la lettre, in taking seriously their emotions around love, representing them for male and female viewers in a manner that builds empathy with the often difficult emotions around love in an era in which women were often constrained by their choice of husband due to any number of factors. That is precisely what makes the maid motif so interesting, since her presence probably signals that these are women courting to some degree outside the watchful eyes of their parents.

To me, the three women at the focus of these paintings seem more distraught than in love, not that those don’t sometimes go hand in hand. Do you have any insights into the emotional texture on display in the works in this show?

You are correct in that none of them seem delighted, exactly, in this process of exchanging love letters, but that is precisely what builds empathy with their various activities and reactions. Vermeer takes their feelings seriously, and in that sense, these works are quite modern. Other painters at the time often used courtship themes purely for purposes of humor, and without the concern for female viewership that Vermeer seems to have had. The patron of the Frick painting was likely the couple Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, and recent research has revealed that the wife may have taken more of a leading role in this patronage than we had assumed. Both of the other two paintings were dear to Vermeer’s wife, Catharina Bolnes, as we know from documents just after his death, in which it became clear that both were in her possession and she wanted to keep them (this was unsuccessful; she used them to settle a debt).