Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

the production of privacy that constitute clues to the political character of these
paintings (157). While underscoring solitude and inner life, these paintings also
point to issues of class and gender.
Three paintings with the theme of letter writing or reading especially
underscore the issue of social class by representing a lady writing or receiving a
letter, and a maid standing next to or behind her: Mistress and Maid (c. 1667-68),
The Love Letter (c. 1670-72), and Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (c. 1670-
72). The presence of the maids in these works points to the women’s different
social spaces, but also to female complicity.
The earliest of the three, the Mistress and Maid is the one that most
emphasizes the women’s complicity when the maid functions as envoy of a letter
the lady has received. It is still in the servant’s hands as she brings it to her
mistress who is sitting at a table with her writing utensils in front of her,
apparently already in the process of or about to write a letter herself. Here, the
composition of the work stresses the symmetry and harmony between the two
women in a room without men, who look each other in the eye, both with their
hands on a piece of paper.
In the two later works, however, and especially in the Love Letter, the
tensions between class boundaries and gender alliances are stronger. The Love
Letter presents the viewer a glimpse through an open door into a hall where the
maid has just interrupted her mistress’ guitar play to give her a letter, a love letter
as the title indicates. But the composition here makes it clear that the maid too has
communal ones (see Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., ed. The Public and the Private in the Age of
Vermeer [London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2000] 19).
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