Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid [SEP] collection
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid is a painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in 1670–1671 and held in the National Gallery of Ireland. The work shows a middle-class woman attended by a housemaid who is presumably acting as messenger and go-between for the lady and her lover. The work is seen as a bridge between the quiet restraint and self-containment of Vermeer's work of the 1660s and his relatively cooler work of the 1670s. It may have
Martin Cahill's associate Martin Foley. Two paintings, Gainsborough's "Madame Bacelli" and Vermeer's "Lady writing a Letter with her Maid", the latter probably the most valuable painting of the collection, were stolen twice across the thefts, although each was subsequently recovered (the latter in 1993, the same year as the recovery of Goya's "Portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate"). The Beit collection has donated many of its works to the state but substantial proportion of the paintings have been returned and been made