When it came time to plan its first temporary exhibition in its newly reopened galleries, the Frick Museum looked to its origins—specifically to 1919, the year of Henry Clay Frick’s very last acquisition, Johannes Vermeer’s His Mistress and Maid, and also the year of Frick’s death. That painting is now on view, joined by two others Vermeers on loan from European museums: Love Letter and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid. A show of three paintings may feel minimal, but not when you consider that so few Vermeers are known to exist (the number vacillates between 34 and 37). What unites these canvases is the quiet drama of letter writing, a device Vermeer and his contemporaries used to explore the inner lives of their subjects. In these paintings, the letter is a lens into class relations, capturing the dynamics of tension, trust, and care between domestic workers and the women they served. —Jeanne Malle