Bringing love into the frame

A new exhibition at the National Gallery gives us a glimpse into the privacy of Dutch middle-class life and love, writes Aidan Dunne

Love Letters, which opens tomorrow at the National Gallery of Ireland, marshals the finest collection of Dutch 17th-century genre painting ever seen in Dublin. Two Vermeers, from Washington and Amsterdam, join our own Lady Writing A Letter With Her Maidservant.

Besides the fact that Vermeer's paintings are exceptional, they are few in number, with well under 40 works being attributed to him. That the gallery has one at all is thanks to the Beit Collection. The chance to see three together should be grabbed - as, indeed, the Beit Vermeer was, twice, from Russborough House, in Co Wicklow.

The Beit paintings have been central to the organisation of this exhibition. Together with the Vermeer, it includes two other Beit paintings, both by Gabriel Metsu, companion pieces generally reckoned to be among the finest of their type. There are many other outstanding visitors from abroad, including beautiful paintings by Gerard ter Borch, Caspar Netscher, Frans van Mieris, Adriaen Van Ostade, Jan Steen, Peter de Hooch, Johannes Verkolje, Nicolaes Verkolje and an exceptional interior by Pieter Janssens Elinga. Some familiar names, others rather less so, but all represented by stunning examples of their work.

It is immediately striking that virtually all of the paintings are modest in scale and surprisingly workaday in their concerns. These unassuming qualities represented a radical departure for European painting of the time. In the Dutch republic, an emergent bourgeoisie enjoyed the benefits of an economic boom. Rather than being commissioned by Church or nobility, artists found themselves dealing with a new, secular, middle-class clientele. In scale, form and content, more and more paintings were designed to hang in small houses rather than grand mansions, palaces and churches. The ramifications for content were extremely important.

Landscape and still life became distinct categories of subject; so, too, did scenes from daily life. Love Letters focuses on one strand of such Dutch genre painting, one that signals the burgeoning self-confidence of an independent citizenry. In his fascinating book Vermeer's Wager, the Vermeer expert Ivan Gaskell argues that the painter set out to embody "systematic abstract ideas" in purely visual form and, remarkably, purely in the context of contemporary domesticity. One of the exciting things about Love Letters is that it features much work from this historical moment, when painting fundamentally adjusted its relationship to us, when it entered our personal worlds in a new way.

On one level the introduction of a letter into a painting is an innocuous enough means of generating narrative interest. It invites the kind of logical, historical questions that many people like to pose and answer as a way of approaching art. Are there, for example, iconographic clues that indicate the content of the letter and its effect on the writer or recipient?

There are of course such clues. In Vermeer's The Love Letter, for example, a maid hands a letter to her mistress. Apart from their body langauge - the surprised, questioning look of the woman and the sympathetic amusement evident in the maid - many other signs point towards the fact that the letter is from lover or husband.

The seascape on the wall behind could be read as indicating that the writer is far away, but it also refers to content. A book of love emblems published by Jan Harmensz Krul in 1640 popularised the image of a ship at sea as a symbol of love: "Love is like the sea, a lover like a ship". But, equally, the lute she holds is commonly used as an attribute of a lover.

Strikingly, Vermeer includes some odd foreground details, including a pair of slippers or shoes, a broom and an empty chair. The art historian Leonard Slatkes points to the prevalence of the shoe as an erotic symbol in popular sayings of the time.

Strikingly similar in a number of respects, the National Gallery's own Metsu, A Young Woman Receiving A Letter, employs many of the same elements, including a shoe - just one - and an empty chair. But the Metsu has a pendant, a corresponding painting - Man Writing A Letter - which lets us see the other end of the transaction. Metsu contrives a disparity in the settings of writer and recipient. The former occupies a more luxuriant space. These superb companion pieces are by no means unique. In fact, two other smaller, beautiful Metsus in the exhibition enact the same outline drama.

Remarkably, the best estimate is that these two paintings, from museums in Montpellier and San Diego, were last together when they were both up for sale in 1818. Paired epistolary compositions, often with male writers and female readers, are held to have been pioneered by Gerard Ter Borch, and there is a fine example here, in which the woman in receipt of a letter from an army officer seals her reply with wax.

It is always tempting to look at pictures in terms of the things depicted, and the business of hunting for narrative clues is part of that process. Put everything together and you solve the puzzle of the picture; it becomes a coherent narrative. But in that sense the meanings of many of these pictures elude us for reasons other than the fact that we are no longer attuned to their symbolism as, for example, their contemporary audience would almost certainly have been.

They are remarkable works, not only as historical indices of their time but also in other respects. Many of them are surprisingly modern in their evocation of orderly domestic urban spaces, the kind of spaces that are by no means unfamiliar to us today, inhabited by ordinary people rather than the exalted protagonists of mythological or history painting. But they also open up other kinds of space.

The presence of a letter, without precise documentary detail of its content and context, generates a sense of private, personal inner life; it opens up a mental space with which we can readily identify.

In her best-selling novel (and now a film) Girl With A Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier memorably wrote herself into a Vermeer, substituting the specifics of who, what, where and when for the mysterious, frozen moment of his painting. But it is the lack of such specifics that accounts in large measure for the fascination of Vermeer's work. In the Beit painting, presumed to come late in Vermeer's fairly short career - he died when he was only 43, in the thick of financial problems - the iconography has become notably sparse and unhelpful from the point of view of art-history sleuths.

A maid waits, idly glancing out of a window while her mistress writes a letter. There is a biblical painting depicting the finding of Moses on the wall, what may be a book or a letter in an envelope thrown on the floor, together with a stick of sealing wax, an empty chair and precious little else. In the words of one commentator cited by Slatkes: "It is Vermeer's final evasion of the requirement of conventional genre painting."

Whereas the conventional approach would be to bombard us with meaningful narrative clues, Vermeer, trusting more and more to his own visual language, Gaskell might argue, doesn't bother to any great extent.

Yet, while art historians may find the paucity and ambiguity of the available information frustrating, the painting is extraordinarily rich and accessible. We as spectators have no problem relating to it. From the confines of this one room we are projected into the inner emotional worlds of these two women, their thoughts, feelings and daydreams. They are ordinary people, not mythological beings, not saints or heroines.

The point of the painting is surely not the incidental, contingent narratives that might define them and of which we remain essentially ignorant. The maid looks outward, through the window. The woman looks inward, to the communication with her correspondent. We can inhabit the brilliantly managed pictorial space of the depicted interior, but just as surely we can inhabit the imaginative, personal, emotional spaces so economically evoked.

Intriguingly, if not altogether convincingly, one historian suggests the crumpled book on the ground may be one of the popular letter-writing manuals of the time, the implication being that the sentiments the woman wishes to express cannot be contained within the letter-writing formulae. In one sense, at least, the historian is right. As Gaskell might put it, Vermeer wants us to look, not read.

Love Letters: Dutch Genre Painting In The Age Of Vermeer is at the National Gallery of Ireland from tomorrow until the end of the year