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…