Rijksmuseum Amsterdã Holanda
OST - 44x38 - 1669-1670
The Love Letter (Dutch: De
liefdesbrief) is a 17th-century genre
painting by Jan Vermeer.
The painting shows a servant maid handing a letter to a young woman with
a cittern.
The painting is in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
The tied-up curtain in the foreground creates the impression that the
viewer is looking at an intensely private, personal scene. There is also an
element of trompe l'oeil as Dutch paintings were
often hung with little curtains to conserve them, and the device of painted
curtains is seen in other Dutch works of the period. The diagonals on
the chequered floor create the impression of depth and three-dimensionality. The fact that it is
a love letter that
the woman has received is made clear by the fact that she is carrying a lute
(more specifically, a cittern, a member of the lute/guitar family). The lute was a
symbol of love - often carnal love; luit was also a slang term
for vagina.
This idea is further reinforced by the slippers at
the very bottom of the picture. The removed slipper was another symbol of sex.
The floor brush would
appear to represent domesticity, and its placement at the side of the painting
may suggest that domestic concerns have been forgotten or pushed aside.
The colors blue and gold are important in the composition of
the painting. In the household that the The Love Letter takes place
in, gilded ornamentation indicates substantial wealth. The gold is located on
the woman's dress, the top of the fireplace, and many of the objects, which
complements the blue on the floor, the maid's dress, the picture frames, etc.
Classical influence is also apparent in the ionic columns of the fireplace.
The two paintings on the wall are also significant. The lower
painting is of a stormy sea, a clear metaphor for tempestuous love. Above it is a
landscape painting of a traveler on a sandy road. This may refer to the absence
of the man who is writing to the lady.
In the second half of the 17th century, the painting probably
found its place in the collection of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's
monarch John III Sobieski. The 1696 inventory of
the Wilanów Palace in Warsaw lists
among Dutch paintings "a painting of a lady, playing a lute in a golden
robe, while a girl gives her a letter in the black frames (obraz damy, grającej
na lutni w złotej szacie, a dziewczyna list jey oddaje w ramach
czarnych)".
On September 23, 1971, the painting was stolen from its display
at The Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels,
where it was on loan from the Rijksmuseum. The thief, 21-year-old Mario Pierre
Roymans, had locked himself in an electrical closet until the museum was
closed. He then took the painting off the wall and tried to escape out of a
window. However, when the frame failed to fit through the window, he cut the
canvas from its frame with a potato peeler and hid the painting in his back
pocket. Roymans first concealed the painting in his room at his place of work,
The Soetewey (or Soete-Wey) Hotel. Later he buried it in a forest, but when it
started to rain, he recovered it and hid it in his room inside his pillowcase.
Roymans is thought to have been motivated by news of the
bloodshed, rape, and murder of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. On October 3,
1971, using the name "Tijl van Limburg" (a character similar to Robin Hood),
Roymans contacted the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and
asked for a reporter to meet him in a forest with a camera. He drove the
reporter, blindfolded, to a church and unveiled the painting from a white cloth
cover. After letting the reporter take photos of the canvas in the cars
headlights, he drove him back. He told the reporter that he actually loved art,
but also loved humanity. After the encounter, the pictures were published,
alongside Roymans’ conditions: 200 million Belgian francs to be given to
famine-stricken Bengali refugees in East Pakistan. Roymans additionally
requested the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels
organize campaigns in their respective countries to raise money to combat world
famine. Roymans set the deadline for these demands to be due Wednesday, October
6.
The police took the photographs as evidence and asked an art
expert to validate that they were of the actual painting. It was confirmed they
were, but immediately after the confirmation, the director of the Rijksmuseum, Arthur van Schendel said that the photos
were not sufficient proof of authenticity. In the following days Roymans
continued to make contact with the media; when he was finally apprehended by
police, on the day of his deadline, trying to call a news station.
The painting was returned to the Rijksmuseum on October 8 but
wasn't announced to the public until October 11. It was in very poor condition
after being cut crudely out of its stretcher bars and frame. The restoration
took almost a year. Roymans was given a court fine and sentenced to two years
in prison, but only served six months.
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