The Love Letter

1670 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

genre

The subject of this painting is a woman at her toilet, reading a letter that must be from a suitor. A maid threads a string of pearls through her mistress's hair. Both a seated woman reading a letter and a maid dressing a young woman's hair are motifs found in paintings of the early 1660s by Gerard Terborch.

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About the Artist

Jacob Ochtervelt

1634 – 1682

Ochtervelt was a Dutch genre painter active mainly in Rotterdam, but from 1674 he lived in Amsterdam. He was influenced by Pieter de Hooch and through him by Vermeer. Apart from a few portraits and some early hunting party and "merry company" scenes, his paintings are almost all elegant upper-class interiors, in which he showed off a skill in painting silks and satins to rival that of Terborch. His figures are extremely refined, but there is often a sexual element in his painting.

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