Woman Writing a Letter

Around 1655 Gerard ter Borch sat a young woman at a table with a quill and a sheet of paper and left her there, absorbed in it. The Mauritshuis counts this small panel as the first of a whole run of letter scenes he went on to paint, and as a model for other painters, Vermeer among them, whose Delft women reading and writing letters came later. Very little happens. She has pushed back a costly Oriental carpet to make room, and beside her stands a softly gleaming pewter inkstand. A blue ribbon and a pearl hang at her ear. What she writes, and to whom, ter Borch never lets us see. In 1928 the oil magnate Henri Deterding bought the panel at an Amsterdam auction for 319,000 guilders and gave it to the museum.