Mulher Escrevendo uma Carta

This is Vermeer in the mid-1660s, in Delft, painting a woman who stops mid-letter to look up at us. Almost everything here is borrowed from his own household. That lemon-yellow jacket trimmed with white fur turns up in the inventory taken after his death, and it appears in several other pictures, so it was a real garment, most likely his wife Catharina's, kept and reused as a studio prop. She is caught in the act of writing, pen still on the paper, and the light comes in soft from the left onto her face and the table. Writing letters had become an ordinary part of Dutch life by then, and Vermeer treats one private moment of it as worth this much care. The pearls and the ribbons in her hair pick up the same daylight.