In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, windows are a place of thought and even refuge for the young heroine. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Natasha leans out her window, dreaming of the future. When it comes to painting, the phrase “woman in the window” brings to mind many images. There’s the dark figure in a Degas painting from 1872, seated in a reddish room and bathed in penumbral light, and Edward Hopper’s half-dressed woman, basking in sunlight and looking out onto a bright city skyline. Then, of course, there’s Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, now restored, its mystery revealed (for 300 years a portrait of Cupid was on the wall beyond the girl, unseen because it was painted over). The examples are countless. At Dulwich, works by 50 artists—including Rembrandt, Hockney, Bourgeois—explore an image that has endured through history. —Elena Clavarino