The Love Letter

The Love Letter is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, dated by the Rijksmuseum to about 1669–1670 and held by the museum in Amsterdam since it was purchased in January 1893.

The 44 × 38.5 cm canvas is built around an unusual vantage point. From a dim anteroom, with a curtain drawn up at the top of the picture, we look through a doorway into a bright room where an elegantly dressed woman, a cittern in her lap, looks up at a maid who has just handed her a letter. The curtain also works as trompe-l'oeil, since Dutch paintings were often hung with small curtains to protect them. Gilding on the dress and the fireplace, set against the blues of the floor, the maid's clothes and the picture frames, marks the household as wealthy.

Several details point to love. The cittern was a common symbol of love, the discarded slippers in the foreground carried erotic connotations, and the broom pushed to one side may suggest that household duties have been forgotten. Of the two pictures on the wall, the lower one shows a ship on a stormy sea; the Rijksmuseum notes that in the 17th century the sea was often compared to love and the lover to a ship. It is Vermeer's only work to include a seascape. Above hangs a landscape with a traveller on a sandy road, perhaps a reference to the absent writer.

A 1696 inventory of Wilanów Palace near Warsaw lists a painting of a lady with a lute in a golden robe receiving a letter from a girl, which may be this picture in the collection of King John III Sobieski. In the 19th century it belonged to Pieter van Lennep of Amsterdam and his heirs. On 23 September 1971, while on loan to the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, it was stolen by a 21-year-old man who cut it from its frame and demanded 200 million Belgian francs for Bengali refugees. He was arrested within days, and the damaged canvas returned to the Rijksmuseum on 8 October; restoration took almost a year.