Travels in Vermeer

by Michael White

  In View of Delft, the comings and goings of men and women are dwarfed by a not altogether friendly sky. But what is realized is thrillingly realized—if from across the water—the city vibrant with gold and russet. Again and again, I’m overcome by desire to enter that city.

  I stay in the Mauritshuis another hour, as my ability to concentrate comes and goes—and finally goes for good. In the cozy museum cafeteria, in the basement, I sit quietly, hoping a frothy double espresso can revive me. It doesn’t. I’m crashing, the long trip catching up with me. It feels like the weight of divorce, jet lag, and the peculiar loneliness of travel are suddenly bearing down. I nod, shudder with two or three convulsive yawns, and realize I have to leave.

  4. Dr. Kees Kaldenbach

  It looks, it feels like the first true summer afternoon of the year as I pedal through Amsterdam’s idyllic Vondelpark. It’s Wednesday, the day before I’m traveling to Delft. I’m on my way to meet an art historian, Dr. Kees Kaldenbach, who lives a couple of blocks from the park’s south gate. He’s one of the best living critics of Vermeer’s work, and probably knows more about Delft, as Vermeer knew it, than anyone.

  Dr. Kaldenbach opens the door. He’s shy and lanky, looming above me as he ushers me into a large, high-ceilinged living room filled with art books and houseplants. He’s awkward and tentative and repetitive in his movements. After offering me a drink (I ask for ice water, which baffles him. “Are you sure?” he asks), he makes a couple of protracted trips to the kitchen before informing me, with a vague wave of the hand, that the freezer is “defrosting.”

  Finally, he manages to provide a glass of slightly cool tap water, and sits down next to me on the sofa. I’ve come armed with a few questions but can’t seem to articulate what I was thinking. I go ahead and try anyway. How much of a given work is “observed,” I wonder, how much “improvised”? Are there patterns, tendencies he can tell me about? But I realize it’s probably impossible to answer, and tell Kaldenbach so. He nods.

  We flip through a glossy book of Vermeer reproductions, until we light on View of Delft. I touch it with my fingertips, and ask if I will be able to see the view, the standpoint from which Vermeer painted, when I go to Delft. Is it still there, or has the city changed too much? “It’s there,” he says. Quickly, he sketches out, with a slender index finger, how much of the actual painting I’ll be able to see as Vermeer saw it. Steeples, one or two particular roofs, here and here and here. How accurate was Vermeer in his portrayal of the town? “Very accurate,” says Kaldenbach. He notes how the two herring buses—fishing boats—are riding unusually high in the water, moored for repairs. The fact that both are missing their masts. Why would he make a choice like that? Would a painter choose to paint two sailboats without their masts if he were not painting from life?

  But I had read, I say, that Vermeer had altered the profile of the town for dramatic effect. That maybe the painting isn’t a literal representation. Kaldenbach nods: “It’s a photoshop.” Certain details are exaggerated. The Nieuwe Kerk steeple, for example, is much taller, more prominent in the painting than it ought to be. What is true about the view, however, is uncannily true. So true, in fact, that Kaldenbach has recently dated the composition of this painting to 1660–61 based on the boat traffic depicted and also on the absence of bells in the Nieuwe Kerk, which were removed then and later replaced by the famous Hemony brothers, whose cast bells were installed in churches throughout Europe.

  I ask if Vermeer used the camera obscura. Kaldenbach believes he did, but that Steadman “goes too far.” He says, “I think Vermeer used it to capture ideas,” but he didn’t slavishly copy what he saw.

  We talk about the many ways in which Vermeer violates what might be thought of as the literal “reality” of a scene. For instance, in The Art of Painting, he points out how the size difference between the two figures, the male painter and female model, is not nearly as great as it ought to be in perspective, with the model at the back of the room, the painter in the middle.

  At heart, according to Kaldenbach, Vermeer’s process is typical for Dutch painters. He explains how the vanishing point of many of Vermeer’s interiors is marked with a tiny pinhole, which you can see in many of the canvases, if you look closely. Kaldenbach points out where it is, exactly, in The Milkmaid, just above the maid’s right hand, which holds the pitcher. Vermeer, like other Dutch painters (whom the Italians, with their refined laws of perspective, considered crude), used a simple chalk line, a pin with a chalked string attached, to check his perspectives. Plucking the string—I imagine the pop, I smell the tiny cloud of chalk-dust—he could trace the vanishing lines directly onto the canvas.

  Kaldenbach tells me how Vermeer experimented with the act, as he puts it, of “looking/encoding into paint/seeing what happens when decoding.” He says, “Vermeer is not interested in what he knows, but in what he sees.” He says that Vermeer finds “new pathways” in the process of encoding/decoding—his move toward abstraction is one of the great examples. It begins about the time of View of Delft, shortly after The Little Street.

  The Little Street, especially, is breathtakingly representational— Anthony Bailey, for instance, lauds its “wonderful plausibility.” Its brushwork manages to lend individual bricks and individual leaves a graceful presence and weight. But a great change has occurred by View of Delft, which involves not only optical effects like the pointillés, but what Kaldenbach calls Vermeer’s “mosaic of abstractions.” The roofs are undifferentiated shapes; flat, tonal values that we read intuitively as things. The painting lifts off, lifts away. The site where the decoding takes place seems to be redefined (as it would be again by the Impressionists). His work grows calm; the paint is thinner, the brushwork less descriptive, more calligraphic. This trend culminates triumphantly in the abstract, Matisse-like style shown in the Vermeers in our National Gallery, coming up soon in my itinerary.

  The interview takes maybe an hour. By then I have run out of questions. What I realize is that I haven’t come looking for answers. I’m trying to enter Vermeer’s world, so I’m here to meet the inhabitants. I find Kaldenbach easy and pleasant to sit with.

  Then I turn to the View again. It has been called a “hymn” to civic pride and the like, but it seems to me to get at something much more basic—a serene, unrepeatable vision of our place, our existence on earth. I ask Kaldenbach if the painting is essentially Dutch in some way, or is it more “universal”? He exclaims, without hesitation, stabbing his finger emphatically at it: “Well, this painting could not have been painted in any other country! Look at it: it is sixty percent sky. Our clouds. Our reflections.”

  We sit another moment. Finally I rise to go, and he escorts me out onto the quiet street. I’m beginning to unlock my bike from the lamppost, fumbling with the combination, when I think of one last thing.

  “In The Girl with a Pearl Earring, is the girl turning toward or away from us?” I ask.

  Kaldenbach looks befuddled, smiles and shrugs from his lofty height. “You can’t be sure, it’s impossible…”

  I know, I want to say. For all the motion implied by her over-theshoulder glance—by the out-flung headdress—it is only the fierce intensity of her glance that matters.

  I shake his hand, swing my leg over the saddle, and push off round the corner, past a bus stop and a herring stand.

  Then I pedal aimlessly through the undulant, nearly-wild byways of the Vondelpark—past clusters of slender young lovers draped over and over and over each other on blankets or on the grass, with guitars and bottles of wine or nothing but each other. I’m suddenly hitting a wall again. Jetlag slows the wheels of the wobbling bike, until I cross a footbridge, meander between two ponds full of swans, then tip over softly, as in a dream. I stretch out in a sunflower glade, and for the first time this year, I’m not wracked with anxiety over how things are going across the ocean—how I’m going to finish the divorce, yet forge a lasting relationship with my daughter—because the moment my head relaxes into the grass,
I’m fast asleep.

  5. The View

  The doors of the Delft station open directly across from the original city, safe behind its ancient walls. It faces me broadside, two steeples in the center, with a fortified gate straight ahead. But instead of passing through and into the town, I turn right and follow the sidewalk around—outside the wall—toward the south end, holding a map half folded in one hand. The fact that Delft has changed so little has much to do with its attraction for me. It isn’t about the town as much as the bricks, the canals, the skies. They are the same red bricks, tea-brown canals, and high white skies that colored every moment of Vermeer’s life and art.

  In five minutes, I reach the south end, the river Schie opening up on my right, a promenade running alongside. I figure this must be the harbor in the painting, but I’m not sure. At one end, there’s a bridge to the other side, so I cross and walk along an embankment where a couple of yachts are moored. When I come to a turn—a little point projecting into the water—there’s an unmarked, flowered terrace looking out on the town. On a small, grassy slope in front of the terrace, four teen-aged girls in bikinis lie sunbathing on towels. I kneel on the walk next to them and, feeling very sheepish, say “Hi,” and then ask collectively, “Does anyone speak English?”

  “A little,” one girl says.

  “Do you know if this is the place where Vermeer painted View of Delft?”

  “Eh, Vermeer?” repeats one, cheerfully. She’s freckled, looks sixteen, and has a mouthful of braces. I spread the map on the grass. An X marks the spot called “Delftview” on the map. Is this it? All four girls swarm about the map, talking all at once and pointing here and there at various landmarks. After a few minutes, as I see we’re getting nowhere, I thank them profusely—they’re really sweet. I step away and realize, after a moment, that it is. This has to be the standpoint.

  Simon Schama thinks Vermeer had been forced to paint Delft from the south because the 1654 Thunderclap had leveled the entire northeast quarter. He doesn’t entirely convince me. I can see that this prospect offers one enormous advantage to Vermeer: distance. Here, and only here, can we look at the city across the widest breadth of the Kolk. From this point, Delft might as well be an island.

  The triangular Kolk spreads before me, in outline unchanged from the seventeenth-century, the two steeples in exactly the same positions across the water as in the painting. The water ripples, full of silvery reflections. On the right-hand side of the view is a traditional Dutch herring bus, moored in exactly the same place as the two in the painting. Its broad, rounded ends; clean whitewash; heavy, varnished mast; and especially, the archaic, varnished leeboards are the real thing. The sky is a bright and high-ceilinged North Sea sky, almost as dramatic as the one in the painting.

  Otherwise, looking at the vista as it is, against the memory of the painting that utterly outshines it, is challenging. Old Delft is celebrated for its state of preservation, and it is almost perfectly preserved, except for the outermost walls on this end, the brick-and-limestone ramparts, gates, and towers from the Golden Age; in other words, except for nearly everything depicted in Vermeer’s painting. An apartment building or two, built in the 1960s, dominate the left-hand side of the vista (Kaldenbach had warned me, rather dejectedly, about this). As for the steeples, the Oude Kerk is now barely visible; the Nieuwe Kerk is dingy with age, but is still imposing. To the right of the bridge, where the main Delft canal enters the Kolk, there is a white storefront with signs reading “CartridgeWorld.” Buses, houseboats, opportunistic gulls.

  I wander along a long, narrow canal around the Kolk. But before I enter the city, I glance back toward Vermeer’s standpoint on the other side. The day is just beginning. Two of the girls (I recognize an orange bikini, pink bikini), one after the other, dive soundlessly into the leaden waters. Their white feet flash into the little salvoes they make, like the feet in Bruegel the Elder’s Icarus. If I’d thought to ask their names, I could have put them here.

  6. A Grave

  Then I turn and lose myself almost immediately in bystreets and bridges, aiming for the Markt and the site of Maria Thins’ house, the last Vermeer residence and his principal studio (Maria Thins was the mother of Vermeer’s wife, Catharina). It’s mostly wrong turns, of course. In the mid-morning lull, I take a seat in a café directly behind the Nieuwe Kerk. The proprietress stands chatting in Dutch for a while before she notes my blank smile and says, “You fooled me,” as she points toward the hometown newspaper unfolded before me. (I’m only looking at the pictures.) “Looking for Vermeer,” I say. She nods vaguely over there, over there, and sets down my café au lait.

  A little while later, I’m staring at a plaque on a corner in Oude Langendijk, right off the Markt, that marks the site of the Vermeer house. The plaque is the work of Dr. Kaldenbach:

  The home of Delft artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) once stood on this corner. He lived here in “Papenhoek,” the Catholic quarter, with his wife, Catharina Bolnes. In his first-floor studio on the street side of the building, Vermeer painted his famous cityscapes and interiors filled with magical light….

  Today, the sprawling, nineteenth-century Maria van Jesse Catholic Church occupies the block of the Oude Langendijk where Maria Thins’ house once stood. The actual space of the Vermeer home is now taken up by a very small side-chapel with its own, tiny entrance off an alley. No one’s inside when I go in and sit. The pews face north, the left side is outer wall, the right a barred entrance to the main nave, where the pews face the other way. Because of its location, here in the Papenhoek, where Mass had to be held in secret, I see the luminous little chapel as a sort of memorial. And it’s a lovely place, which Kaldenbach had described as “hallowed ground.” Yet I feel nothing.

  What had I expected? The cast of north light filtering down from the left as in the paintings, stray sounds of the Markt, stillness of the hours? It is, but it isn’t here. The chapel, belonging to another age, has nothing to do with Vermeer. It isn’t his space anymore. I realize immediately that this is how it should be. I swallow, pause for a moment, then turn to go.

  Abruptly the Nieuwe Kerk carillon begins to chime, shivering through the modern stained glass. I can’t place the song, some sort of country waltz. Then I remember that the bells were replaced the year Vermeer was painting View of Delft. These are the same bells he would’ve heard—reverberating through every square inch of his studio—for most of his working life. So I listen and listen and wait for the carillon to end before taking my leave, out through the side entrance, back toward the Markt again.

  My next stop is but a couple of dozen yards away: the Nieuwe Kerk itself. It is a high, bright sanctuary, dominated by William of Orange’s ornate marble mausoleum, placed where I might expect an altar. This Dutch landmark (the architect was Hendrick De Keyser, who also designed Amsterdam’s beloved Westerkerk) is probably the grandest monument in the entire country, always a mainstay of the tour circuit. Painters came for inspiration and beggars worked the area for easy pickings even in Vermeer’s day. It’s an operatic, canopied deathbed effigy complete with weeping cherubs, a likeness of the beloved hero’s dog, and the memento mori of grinning skulls. Which gives me a faint case of the creeps.

  The Markt happens to be a market this particular day, and I wind my way very slowly through the rows of fragrant fish stalls, cheese stalls. The steeple chimes the hour again, but the pigeons milling about the square—wherever they find a few square feet—don’t fly away or even stir.

  I walk circuitously toward the leaning tower of the Oude Kerk, visible over a bank or two of rooftops. The older, brick and white stone church, like the newer one, was originally Catholic, but was stripped bare by iconoclasts during the Reformation. Walking into it, it feels unfinished, undecided, and in fact, its gothic cruciform shape was never completed. There’s only part of one of the crossing halls, the northern one. I walk on the foot-worn markers, tour the entire space—without finding any trace of Vermeer at all—then go back to the entr
ance, and purchase a guide map in the souvenir shop.

  Vermeer’s grave is located a bit off center, where the crossing would have been. There’s only the chiseled name and dates on a stone perhaps sixteen inches square: an ordinary stone in the floor. I stare at it balefully. Suddenly I don’t know why I’m here. My visit to Delft is over.

  I resign myself to wandering aimlessly. I buy a big, conical purple candle for Sophia, because it’s goofy and sparkly and I know she will love it. For myself, I buy a small Delft porcelain plate, painted a rich ultramarine, because it looks authentic—it looks like Delft. It depicts a long-tailed bird, maybe a pheasant.

  Eventually, late afternoon, I stumble onto the tourist information office in the center of the city. The girl at the desk is probably a university student, twenty or twenty-one. Thin, brunette, thick glasses, reading a fat paperback novel I can’t make out. I say I’m looking for Vermeer. She fishes for a brochure beneath the counter, but stops, mid-gesture, and looks at me again, a conspiratorial look in her great dark eyes.

  “There’s nothing left,” she confides.

  “I know,” I say. “But I’ve come a long way.”

  “Sorry,” she says, with a little smile. She opens a map and points at the standpoint for View of Delft.

  “You can still go there,” she says. “But it looks nothing like it did then.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  She brightens. “If you want to see what it looked like in Vermeer’s day, go to the Oostpoort.” She traces a route with a slender thumb along the Oosteinde canal to, and through, the city’s last remaining gate. She also makes a little X on my map just past the Oostpoort, in the Oostplein, site of a great ice-cream shop. “Do you like ice cream?”

  I don’t say anything, but nod so emphatically she has to smile, the afternoon sun lighting her pale, freckled face—her luminous teeth—and says she often stops there when she goes to the Oostpoort.