Picasso's Blue Period from his works. Members of the public were uninterested in displaying the Blue Period works in their homes. Picasso continued his output, but his financial situation suffered: From 1901 to 1903, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting "La Vie", painted in 1903 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The same mood pervades the well-known etching "The Frugal Repast" (1904) which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in "The
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter the quotidian, private moment becomes revealing of the human condition. The painting is unique among Vermeer's interiors in that no fragment of corner, wall or ceiling can be seen. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter Woman Reading a Letter () is a painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Part of the collection of the City of Amsterdam as part of the Van der Hoop bequest, it has been in the Rijksmuseum since its inception, and was thus the first Vermeer they acquired. The central element of the painting is a woman in blue standing in front of a window