Art Review—"Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick

Vermeer’s Love Letters

The Frick Collection

1 East 70th Street, New York, NY

Through August 31, 2025

frick.org

The 3 Vermeer paintings at the Frick exhibit 

In 2021, when the Frick Collection began renovating the venerable mansion housing its art and put on display some of its invaluable collection at the nearby Breuer building on Madison Avenue, it seemed the opposite of the Frick’s mission to show its stunning art in its original location, Henry Clay Frick’s ornate home. What worked at the Breuer was that several items—always seen far above or away from visitors—were at eye level and easier to study and admire. However, the sense of a collector arranging his valuable artworks and furnishings where he wanted to place them was lost.

Mistress and Maid

Now, more than four years later, that is no longer the case: the Frick has reopened in its original space, which has been beautifully expanded. It was my first time visiting the upgraded building, so I was able to see what’s been updated as well as view the dazzling new exhibit, Vermeer’s Love Letters, in the new Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries. 

The enlarged Frick now includes access to rooms on the second floor that were previously off-limits to the public, where there are more paintings and other objects like a collection of medals. It's still satisfying to visit the city’s best small art museum, although it’s less small now.

Vermeer’s Love Letters brings together three of Vermeer’s works—the Frick’s own Mistress and Maid, The Love Letter from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid from Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland—for a detailed look at how the artist treated the subject of letter writing as well as one of his favorite subjects: women in domestic situations.

Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid 

Exploring this magnificent trio in a single gallery is a once-in-a-lifetime experience—these intimately-scaled works contain so much painterly and poetic detail that they invite the exceptionally close viewing this exhibit allows. (At the press preview, my wife and I were the only ones in the gallery since everyone else was attending a talk in the auditorium, allowing us several precious minutes alone with these exceptional beauties.)

As these paintings show, Vermeer often worked on a small scale, amazingly packing so much aliveness, truth and humanity into his canvases. When looking at Vermeer’s works, you get lost in their singular worlds: what are these women thinking or saying, and what do the precisely placed objects—for example, in the Amsterdam and Dublin pictures, the paintings on the walls behind the women—symbolize? Even the large dark space behind the women in Mistress and Maid speaks volumes. 

The Love Letter

It’s not often one gets the chance to see Vermeer paintings from outside the U.S. Indeed, at the 1995-96 Vermeer exhibition in Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art I attended, 21 of his extant paintings were included, but The Love Letter was not there, so this exhibit is my first time seeing it. Its miniature magnificence is as breathtaking as the other two paintings.

Vermeer’s Love Letters is a small exhibit only in quantity—it’s monumental in every other sense.