窗边读信的少女

For most of its modern life this looked like a quiet Vermeer of a young woman absorbed in a letter beside a window, the back wall behind her an empty stretch of pale plaster. An x-ray in 1979 showed there had once been a large picture painted on that wall, a standing Cupid, and for decades people assumed Vermeer had thought better of it and painted it out himself. The restoration finished in 2021 proved otherwise. The overpaint was added by someone else, decades after his death, and conservators in Dresden removed it. The Cupid is back. He stands on two fallen masks, an old emblem of honest love defeating deceit, which turns the letter she is reading into something more specific. Look at the crumpled green curtain in the foreground and the fruit spilling from a dish on the table below her hands.