Although he began his career as a painter of religious subjects, Metsu became one of the most accomplished specialists of depictions of daily life in his time. His oeuvre shows great variety, as he easily adopted subjects and styles from other artists and transformed them into new compositions.
This painting and its counterpart, Woman Reading a Letter (ngi.4537), are Metsu’s most famous works and belong to the finest Dutch genre paintings produced in the seventeenth century. Both pictures reveal the influence of Johannes Vermeer, whose work Metsu may have known through a visit to Vermeer’s workshop in Delft or, more likely, from seeing them at the house of Pieter Claesz van Ruyven, a local collector who probably owned up to 20 paintings by Vermeer. The theme of letter writing enjoyed great popularity among Dutch genre painters of the 1650s–60s. In this painting, the man is in the process of writing a letter; presumably for the lady represented in its pendant. The man’s fashionable black costume and the Persian carpet on the table suggest that he is well-to-do. The globe behind the window underscores his erudition.
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