A Crime of Compassion
Three centuries after Vermeer painted ’The Love Letter’ it was stolen for ‘noble reasons’, but how many lives is a priceless painting worth?
The Love Letter is a late-career painting by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer, completed around 1670. It’s a great stimulus for discussing different ways of reading an image as it readily invites both formalist and iconographic approaches. The work also lends itself to extended anecdotal and narrative engagement due to the subject it depicts and its contextual history, not least due to its high profile, politically-motivate theft in the early 1970s. I knew that it had been stolen and recovered, that’s usually a footnote in textbook mentions of the painting, but I only just followed-up the story behind the headlines whilst writing the review for a recently restored Italian giallo, directed by Lucio Fulci…
Vermeer was always concerned with visual integrity and his paintings became increasingly structural. Here, the canvas is divided into a rectilinear grid that pretty much adheres to the Golden Ratio. Vermeer often used frames within frames, setting-up a rigid rhythm that helped achieve harmonious balance in his more complicated compositions. A similar, albeit simplified, approach was employed by Marie-Denise Villers and then by James Abbot McNeill…
