Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window

This intimate domestic scene shows a young Dutch woman standing in profile at an open window, absorbed in reading a letter. Soft daylight illuminates her face and reflects her image in the glass pane, while a rich red drapery frames the window above. On the table before her, a rumpled carpet and a dish of fruit including a halved peach add texture and symbolic weight to the composition.

The painting's attribution was uncertain for nearly three centuries. It was initially credited to Rembrandt, then to Pieter de Hooch, before being correctly identified as a Vermeer in 1860. The work entered the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden in 1742 and survived both the bombing of World War II and a period of seizure by Soviet forces before returning to Dresden in 1955.

A landmark restoration between 2018 and 2021 uncovered a remarkable secret. X-ray analysis had long revealed an image hidden beneath a painted-over section of wall, but it was only in 2017 that conservators confirmed this overpainting was done by a later hand, not by Vermeer himself. Through painstaking work with scalpel and microscope, restorers revealed a large painting of Cupid on the back wall, fundamentally transforming the work's meaning and strongly suggesting that the young woman is reading a love letter.