Mistresses and Maids at the New and Improved Frick

“There are five Vermeers in the building,” John Updike Curator Aimee Ng proclaimed at a recent preview of the Frick Collection’s first show, Vermeer’s Love Letters, in the newly christened Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries, and it’s kind of a big deal.

It’s a big deal because Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), who died in poverty at age 43, produced only some three dozen works in the course of his career—35 to 37, “depending on how you count them or who you ask to count the paintings,” guest curator Robert Fucci, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, said at the unveiling of the new exhibition.

The Frick owns three Vermeers. One, Mistress and Maid (ca. 1664-67), was the very last picture that museum founder Henry Clay Frick purchased for his collection in 1919 and is the centerpiece of the current show. The two works bookending the display are highly prized loans—The Love Letter (ca. 1669-70) from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid (ca. 1670-72) from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

As Ng noted in her remarks, there are not only five Vermeers at the mansion right now, including two in their usual spots at the foot of the grand staircase, but five more farther uptown at The Met Fifth Avenue. That’s 10 Vermeers in total that can be seen on the Upper East Side this summer, or almost one-third of the artist’s surviving oeuvre.

“Vermeer is an artist that we cannot get enough of. So we’ve had really, really crowded galleries since reopening after a five-year closure,” Ng said. “The last time we had this many people here was 2013 when the star, [the museum] Mauritshuis’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, was at the Frick, and we had lines around the block. So Vermeer certainly continues to compel people and to inspire people today.”

Fans of 17th-century Dutch art will recall that blockbuster event more than a decade ago, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, with Vermeer’s Girl holding court in the Oval Room for three months, an unforgettable Mona Lisa moment for New Yorkers.

The current show represents another transcendent moment for the city. It is true, Ng said, that the three Vermeers gathered in the new exhibition space could have been seen two years ago at the Rijksmuseum’s “once in a lifetime” showcase of 28 paintings by the master. But they are now united around a single theme, “together in a single gallery, side-by-side, for the very first time.”

Fucci, a scholar of 17th-century Dutch art, noted that Vermeer produced six pictures on the theme of letter-writing (around one-sixth of his corpus), but the three earliest iterations depict solitary figures—mistresses sans the maids. The works presented here, of course, offer a fuller picture, with a maidservant acting as both confidante and messenger. They are enigmatic scenes that rely on us to piece together a wealth of visual clues, like a puzzle.

“Vermeer begins to include the secondary figure of the maid as a very important way to thematize this interaction between the person writing and receiving the letters, who is presumably carrying on an affair or some sort of courtship with a lover who is not present in these works, and the maid who acts as the go-between. And what that does is to add a certain narrative motion,” Fucci said. “It adds an emotional foil for the reaction between these figures, but it also really, quite subtly, plays on this idea of this receipt. This moment of receiving a letter, thematized in two of these paintings very directly, and indirectly in the Dublin painting as well. That moment when you have a message that you have not yet opened. We can all relate to that today.”

The tension and uncertainty are palpable. Reading the tea leaves in the Rijksmuseum’s Love Letter, for instance, in which an anxious-looking mistress is holding a sealed letter and a cittern (a guitar-like instrument), the maid has a knowing, reassuring look. The help is clearly in on the game.

As Fucci said, “That’s the wonderful thing about the maids in these paintings. They have extra intelligence. They are the ones going to the other person, delivering a letter or receiving a letter. They have no doubt witnessed some sense of emotion involved in that process. And even in the Frick painting [Mistress and Maid], her mouth is open. She’s imparting some additional information. We have no idea what it is, but it’s also that sense that it’s not just that the letter contains information, [but that] the maid also has some role in this courtship.”

They were romantic conduits, acting in secrecy, unbeknownst to the parents. Interestingly, it was a time when women were being given more say in the choice of a life partner, though that choice “was very often still the domain of the parents,” Fucci said.

Add the show to your summer bucket list and take note of advice from curator Aimee Ng: “In very classic Frick style, this is an exhibition that encourages, fosters, invites close looking, deep thinking, and simply marveling at staggering works of art.”

Vermeer’s Love Letters at the Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St. Through Aug. 31, 2025. https://www.frick.org/