Most of the letters in these twelve paintings cannot be read. The painters kept the words out of sight and let a face, a hand or a crumpled sheet on the floor say what was in them. When the words do show, they are not always the ones that were written: one painter rewrote, in his own phrasing, a note found on a killer.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting holds a single instant. A letter brings a before and an after into it: someone wrote it elsewhere, and what it says will change what happens next. The writer is almost never in the frame, so a face and a pair of hands have to carry the words.
Every picture here puts a sheet of paper at the center of the scene, being written, read, carried or hidden. The rule for choosing was simple: the letter had to drive the story, not lie on a table as a prop.
Seen together, nearly all twelve share one idea. The letter brings into the room someone who never appears in the picture, and the painting is as much about that absent person as about the one holding the paper.
12. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Merchant Georg Gisze (1532)
Between the fingers of a young merchant, a small folded letter is still half shut. He stands in a black cap behind a table covered with a patterned carpet, in sleeves of shiny red silk, and all around him, on green wooden walls, more letters are tucked behind thin strips of wood, beside a pair of scales and a metal seal.
The merchant is Georg Gisze, and the room is in London. Gisze came from Danzig, the Baltic port now called Gdańsk, and since 1522 he had worked at the Steelyard, the London base of the German traders of the Hanseatic League.
In 1532, Hans Holbein the Younger painted him there. Holbein had arrived from Basel only a few months earlier, around New Year, and the panel is among his first English commissions.
The letter in Gisze's hands is the place to start reading. Its address is written in Low German, the everyday language of the Hanseatic towns: "Dem erszamen Jorgen Gisze to lunden in engelant mynem broder to handen." In English: "Into the hands of my brother, the honorable Jorgen Gisze in London in England."
Only one brother fits. Tiedemann Giese, a Catholic churchman and scholar who later became a bishop, was the only brother of Georg still alive in 1532, so the letter Holbein placed in the sitter's hands comes from him.
The portrait itself was probably meant to travel back along the same road, to show the family in Danzig how well Gisze was doing, and the crowd of papers and objects around him serves that purpose. The letters on the wall, folded and sealed with their addresses turned outward, are all addressed to him in London, and they show him at work as a trader.
Holbein made every one of those addresses legible, down to each sender's spelling. One writes the name "ghysszen", another "gyssze", and he painted every doubled consonant.
At a Glance
Artist: Hans Holbein the Younger (about 1497 to 1543)
Painted: 1532
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 97.5 × 86.2 cm (38.4 × 33.9 in)
Where to see it: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin
About This Painting
What is Holbein's most famous painting?
The answer most often given is The Ambassadors, a double portrait of two Frenchmen that he painted in London in 1533, the year after this one. It hangs in the National Gallery in London and is known for the stretched skull across its foreground, which only looks normal when seen from a point to the right of the picture.
11. Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter (1664-1666)
A young man in black writes a letter at a table covered with a red Persian carpet. The woman it is meant for hangs in another frame, and for more than two and a half centuries the two pictures were never sold apart. Then, in 1986, both of them disappeared.