青い服を着て手紙を読む女

Vermeer painted this in Delft around 1663, in the middle of the Dutch Republic's long run of seaborne trade and sea wars, when a great many husbands were away for months at a stretch. That distance is the quiet subject here. A woman in a blue jacket stands in the morning light, wholly still, reading a letter she is halfway through. On the wall behind her hangs a large map of Holland, the kind of object that in these pictures points to someone traveling, and viewers have long read the letter as coming from a husband at sea. Her loose jacket and rounded shape have made many wonder whether she is expecting a child, which would sharpen the wait. Vermeer keeps everything pinned to that sheet of paper, the empty chairs, the closed table, and gives her no window in view, only the daylight arriving on her face.