Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (around 1663), which belongs to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, arrived at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC on 19 September (until 1 December), its third stop in the US after tours at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego earlier this year. The presentation at the NGA marks the 20th anniversary of the museum’s Vermeer retrospective, which included the painting, but a recent restoration of the piece means US viewers see a different picture. “Our conservator, Ige [Verslype], found much more original paint by Vermeer than we ever dreamt of beneath all the overpainting,” which was stripped away, says Pieter Roelofs, the Rijkmuseum’s curator of 17th-century Dutch paintings.
