Brian Fay is concerned with using different drawing technologies to record and mark time through his artwork. Vermeer Lady Writing a Letter with Maid is part of an on-going series of drawings interrogating the crazed surface of canonical paintings, including those of Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer, Corot, Malevich and Mondrian.

The drawings are derived from the surfaces and x-rayed layers of old paintings, referencing both the time since the painting was completed and the time involved in its production. His 'crack drawings' and prints, which utilise conservators' radiograph and X-Ray images of paintings as their source material, map the degradation of works on canvas, revealing their fragility and marking the friction of time and environment.

Purchased 2007.