A Feast of Vermeers plus Fragonard -- and Richter: Girls Reading [by DL]

Tom Clark's blog today features a gallery of paintings by Vermeer and such others as Pieter de Hooch, Pieter Elinga, Gabriel Metsu plus a mighty fine Fragonard from 1770 and a recent Gerhard Richter (left). Each exemplifies one of the great recurrent portraiture subjects: a girl reading. She may be reading a letter, a book of verses or hymnal, or, in Richter's pianting, a magazine that looks like Time. Totally absorbed in her reading, she is oblivious to the painter, the observer, and so we catch her at that moment of utter genuineness when she engages in a silent dialogue with a lover or with god, with a soul laid bare or with the external world, the world of commerce as represented by a Vermeer map, by Pieter de Hooch's open window, or by the newsmagazine in the hands of the blonde girl with the hoop earrings, Richter's wife, Sabine,in the 1994 painting, "Lesende" ("Reader"). -- DL