Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, painted around 1657–1659 and held since 1742 by the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.

An early work, it shows a young woman in profile reading a letter beside an inward-opening window whose glass reflects her face. A red curtain hangs over the window, a rug-covered table in front holds a tilted bowl of fruit with a halved peach, and a green curtain drawn across the right foreground acts as a trompe-l'oeil device. John Michael Montias pointed to the tiny white dots of light in the brighter passages; with Officer and Laughing Girl, this is among the earliest known examples of the pointillé effect associated with Vermeer. The canvas measures 83 × 64.5 cm, a format he rarely used.

In April 1742 the picture was bought in Paris for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony, as a work by Rembrandt; by 1826 it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch, and it was the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger who recognised it as Vermeer's. During the Second World War it was stored in a tunnel in Saxony, taken by the Red Army, and returned to Dresden in 1955.

X-rays had long shown a large framed painting of Cupid on the back wall, which scholars assumed Vermeer had painted out himself. Investigations begun in 2017 found layers of dirt and aged binder between Vermeer's paint and the grey covering layer, proving that the overpaint was added decades later by another hand. Conservators removed it with scalpels under a microscope, and the restored painting went back on view in 2021. The Cupid resembles the one in A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and may reproduce a work by Cesar van Everdingen; its presence suggests that the girl is reading a love letter.