Travels in Vermeer

by Michael White

  Both buildings were residences—palatial, but lived-in residences, which makes them ideal for experiencing a Vermeer. The hot, seventeenth-century, Dutch art market, driven by a newly wealthy middle class buying up paintings for fashionable homes (when they weren’t investing in tulips), was domestic and secular in nature. Smaller paintings, especially portraits or exotic still-lifes—filled with the luxury items a maritime economy could provide—were in. The idea of seeing a real Vermeer in somebody’s living room boggles the mind nowadays, but that’s the right setting for this artist’s eye-level interiors, and the Frick or the Mauritshuis is as close as one gets to that experience.

  The first painting I see in the Frick, in the passageway called the South Hall, is a small, jewel-like Vermeer: Officer with Laughing Girl (c. 1655–60). Kees Kaldenbach had called this painting “extraordinarily luminous,” and it’s clear, as soon as I turn the corner, why he’d said that. In this early genre piece, Vermeer imagines a relationship between the officer and the young woman that not only reflects light but, like most of the Vermeers I’ve seen, this one actually seems to glow. The seemingly casual placement—in a murky passageway, among period marble and velvet furnishings—only emphasizes its alchemical radiance.

  Officer with Laughing Girl seems especially vulnerable, too, hanging alone and so close to the museum’s outer doors, and this vulnerability is heightened by the fact that none of the paintings here are covered with glass.

  I give Officer with Laughing Girl a wide berth at first. I linger in its vicinity. Passers-by on their way to the great galleries at the end of the hall, filled with big canvases by Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, say, “Look! A Vermeer!” Just as in all the other museums. But when we’re alone again, I zoom in. To do this, I have to lean over a gilt-painted antique chair, placed directly beneath the painting. A gold, tasseled rope is laid across its gold satin cushion, embroidered with cupids and bizarre, winged busts—in order to keep onlookers back, I suppose. It doesn’t completely work, in my case. The gorgeousness of the painting prompts me to lean precariously over the chair, until I trigger the motion sensor. I’ve done this often enough, in other museums, to feel only a little shame when the alarm beeps. A smiling young guard with tight cornrows—wearing a maroon jacket like a Shriner—appears discreetly to my left. We exchange nods as I back off.

  Again and again, when I glance up, my breath catches in my throat. The feeling isn’t Here is art, but Here is life.

  As critics point out, Officer with Laughing Girl comes directly (much more directly than Vermeer’s later work) out of the mid-century genre tradition. It bears a striking resemblance especially to Pieter De Hooch’s The Card Players. Vermeer painted only a few such scenes, and these early works culminate in Officer with Laughing Girl. Edward Snow says this painting has “the feeling more of a last than a first work.” In fact it was a last work of sorts, as, after this, Vermeer settled almost completely on the solitary subject, his calling all along. Snow spends the middle portion of his book thinking about three further exceptions in the oeuvre, The Concert, Couple Standing at a Virginal, and An Artist in His Studio, all depictions of groups or couples. He calls these paintings “reflections on the matrix within which his solitary women take shape.”

  The window at left in Officer with Laughing Girl, especially the sun-infused lozenges of panes on the upper row, is among my favorites of all his magnificent windows. (My very favorite is the one in The Milkmaid.) The outside surfaces of the partially open, inward opening, right-hand casement shimmer with swirling, gray-green, platinum shapes as the light rakes over it, registering nuances as slight as the varying thicknesses of the faceted panes. Smudges, imperfections are passionately captured with Vermeer’s characteristic brew of verisimilitude and freedom. On the other, still-closed casement— blue in the center, gold on the sides—I make out the ochre ghost of a building in the lower left-hand corner. Once through the window, the otherworldly flow of north light is registered by one of Vermeer’s first bare walls, and is caught especially in the face of the bonneted girl.

  At first I see this as a traditional genre scene, which might be taken either as a girl visiting with her suitor in her house or as a woman in a bordello “entertaining” an officer in uniform. The male figure is viewed from the back. We cannot quite see his expression as he sits across from her at a table, but he wears a bright red jacket with a sash or shoulder strap, and a large black hat, tilted jauntily. Foregrounded as he is, he’s a disproportionately massive and shadowy shape. He looms between window and woman, taking up all the space and blocking the painting’s left center. It’s a radical perspective that suggests the use of a camera.

  She, on the other hand, seems tiny, almost childlike, and emotionally open. Besides the cotton bonnet drawn closely about her face, she wears the yellow bodice with black braiding (perhaps Vermeer’s most characteristic outfit), and a white collar. There’s nothing overtly disclosed here to make me think of the women who appear in the traditional bawdy genre scenes of the time.

  In fact, I’m deeply moved by the ways Vermeer shelters her, even from my own intense gaze. Rather than present her in the typical attire of tousled, open blouse with dramatic décolletage, he covers almost every square inch of her with the stiff, embroidered dress—only a hint of throat exposed—her bonnet tied tightly beneath her chin.

  The artist Jonathan Janson, on his website The Essential Vermeer, summarizes critical sentiment: “It is impossible for us to ignore the young woman’s radiant optimism … Her expression is so positively charged that even the officer’s reticence is effectively dissimulated.” This is what I expected to see in the Frick: another of Vermeer’s serene, angelic studies like The Milkmaid or Woman Holding a Balance. The real Vermeer, for me.

  Yet, as I keep studying her, the girl’s animated presence takes me by surprise. She sits leaning a little toward the officer, hands before her on the table—her right hand lightly curled around the stem of a full wineglass. What Janson sees as “radiant optimism” can be seen in another way: her face seems almost livid, lit with alcohol and desire.

  Or else she is flushed from the chill I can feel, wafting through the open window.

  Yet, her lips are full and defiantly—almost shockingly—red.

  Finally, I see something more: her left hand. There’s a single gesture at the heart of this painting—it’s how her hand lies relaxed, palm-upward, on the table, index finger provocatively curled toward the officer. The hand shapes a startlingly lewd caress—though all it holds at the moment is light and air—inches from the body of the wary officer.

  I can hardly believe it—but it does confirm on the simplest level what is going on between the two. Still, the painting remains unknowable, each volatile detail contradicting the next. The girl is seen in the most flattering, yet also the least flattering light possible—which is, for me, part of Vermeer’s triumph.

  The viewer is the complicating factor—I am the third character, addressed more and more directly as Vermeer matures. I gaze now, a little voyeuristically, over the officer’s shoulder at the girl, evaluating her much as he might. Who is she? I wonder. His body language is tense, his right arm akimbo, his huge right hand massively crumpled on his right hip, where she can’t see it, but I can. The officer’s face is shown in three-quarter profile, from the rear—the protruding nose, the merest glint of an eye. I can’t read his apparently conflicted and withheld intentions, but there’s more, much more than a hint of threat in him. He makes me wonder: As a man, how often have I presented myself in such a way? How often have I been the shadow looming in a room?

  And still her unguarded sweetness comes shining back. No matter how I see her, what is undeniable is the intent, native warmth of her smile, framed by the bonnet—as it is in Woman Holding a Balance, as it is with his other beneficent creatures. Apart from her startling flush or the apparently lewd gesture of her left hand, her face—her unguarded sweetness—is still the focal point, deepening the work by denying easy resol
ution. It knocks me flat.

  It is a purity of love that permeates the lighted cube of space. Her right-hand edge is traced with light. Her white collar is shadowed just at the edge dun-gray, a bit darker than necessary, in order to contrast more decisively with the whitewash. Her bonnet is one of the characteristic, subliminal miracles of its type. It features a shadow on the side that is similar to the shadow-hands that gently support the heads of his later women. Folded behind the head, following the curve of the skull, it forms an illumined sliver of crescent moon. Like the more dramatic hands in the later works, this moon isn’t immediately obvious, but once it is seen, it can’t be unseen. In any case, this slender figment of moon seems to cup the lovely girl’s skull, protecting her, cradling her with a sidelong halo.

  All this, again, in service of what? For Vermeer doesn’t follow nature, exactly, and he doesn’t exactly follow light. It’s the light of love he cares about: her lit face facing down the dark. Her purity, the purity of love envelops the officer too, and envelops me as well. She is not Mary Magdalene. She is no more nor less, thank God, than her mortal, bought-and-paid for self; her plaintively, lewdly beckoning hand; but she is enough. She is all there is.

  The male/female relationship, Snow points out, is seldom taken as subject beyond this point. What happens now is that the solitary women take center stage, and the dialogue in the genre scenes is reconfigured between viewer and subject. The dramas embodied in the early scenes are internalized; the apparatus is stripped away. The hungering gaze of The Girl with a Pearl Earring, for instance, addresses me—just as I gaze back at her—with an immediacy and urgency that Vermeer had mapped out, figure by figure, in these few early works.

  2. Maps

  The Dutch were the world’s cartographers, and maps and globes are among Vermeer’s stock props. The map on the back wall in Officer with Laughing Girl is easily one of his best. It’s an infinitely detailed depiction of seventeenth century Holland, based on a published map of the day that Vermeer probably owned (since it appears in several paintings). Looking at it, at first I don’t recognize it as Holland. (Later, I will learn that the convention of orienting maps with north upward wasn’t standard in Vermeer’s day.) The top of the painting shows the seacoast—so that north is right, south is left. What’s even more confusing to the modern eye is that the painting reverses what we think of as traditional colors for land and sea: the sea is brown, the land blue. Only the tiny sailing ships placed all over the brown Zuiderzee help identify it as water. The effect is, at least, disorienting. In Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the same map is rendered completely in dark gold and sepia tones. Vermeer zooms in there, cutting off the seacoast and focusing on the aortal tributaries and marshlands toward the left of this view. In fact, the geography is still precisely rendered, although Holland becomes something entirely other: abstractly tectonic, brooding behind the hidden thoughts of the silent, reading woman, like a rippling, organic manifestation of consciousness itself.

  Here, in Officer with Laughing Girl, the map is much clearer and more detailed, with readable inscriptions and place names. But the color reversals boggle me mentally. Everything is topsy-turvy—a secret, looking-glass world. The bottom edge of the map just grazes the top of the woman, who is positioned nearer to it in perspective. The great black hat of the officer, however, blocks a portion of it on his side. The map might be an allusion to the “real” world, open to the officer but not to the girl. That’s one obvious reading. What I see, however, is the terra incognita of love.

  3. Interrupted

  A little farther down the South Hall is another small Vermeer, Girl Interrupted in Her Music (c. 1658–61). It’s dim and in a very poor state of preservation. Still, I love its smoky/subaqueous vibe. It features a couple that has been studying sheet music, perhaps playing a duet. There’s a still life on the table before them that includes a lute, more sheet music, a Delftware pitcher, and a glass of scarlet wine. The instruments—music itself—of course, are part of the trope. And the cavalier seems to offer an ideal, deferential sort of love—one hand on the sheet of music, almost touching the girl’s right hand; the other resting lightly on the back of her chair. He’s dressed in a nonthreatening gray cloak, as he stands close to her, sheltering, attentive, the opposite of the man in Officer with Laughing Girl. The vague background—the almost illegible painting of Cupid hanging behind the couple, on the smudged rear wall, and the chair—is badly abraded. But there are a number of very striking details: the finials on the nearer chair are especially crisp (they face inward, almost like a third presence at the table), and the pitcher is amazingly, almost photographically clear. The girl’s blouse is a vivid blood red that stands out in an interior of muted blues and grays, and rhymes visually with the last of the wine in her glass.

  What transforms the painting is the girl’s direct glance over her left shoulder. She’s a prototype for The Girl with a Pearl Earring, whose own gaze challenges as directly, but also ambiguously, from over her left shoulder.

  But here the glance is not brimming with conflict, reproach, desire, urgency. This glance is unfazed, deadpan, straight-into-thelens. It’s not exactly a lovely face, but Vermeer insinuates loveliness in the broad-boned cheeks, the wide set of her eyes, and in her heart-shaped mouth. She looks straight at me, whoever I am, a stand-in for the painter or an intruder (or perhaps both), whom the gentleman in the painting has not yet noticed. But what is most disconcerting about her gaze is what is not expressed. There is no trace of alarm. Does she know the intruder—does she know me? Or is my presence simply nonthreatening to her? Yet there is also no sense of welcoming, no flicker of gladness or even empathy in her features. She simply stares at me, patiently, impassively.

  Her eyes are dark enough to stand out of the shadows, as they mark my entrance into the scene, a scene that is about to change, I know, yet cannot know how. And it is only in the mysterious way things do stand out of the watery air—in the exquisite clarity of the still life, the hue of her blouse, the darkness of her irises—that I dimly sense what is at stake. The painting is a love song, sung in a minor key. The lesson goes on, the girl’s future is unfolding, but for now—as she turns to face the painter, her familiar—she meets fate with open eyes. The sunlight fades, the phosphorescent objects gleam, and this work, like Officer with Laughing Girl, is not easy for me to walk away from.

  The last Vermeer in the Frick, in the grand West Gallery, is a large one. Mistress and Maid (1666–67) is an epistolary scene, like A Lady Writing, and once again features the yellow jacket with ermine trim. It depicts an elegant lady, poised with face turned in three-quarter profile away from me, with quill in hand, just as she is interrupted by the arrival of a portentous letter, delivered by a trusted and ruddy maid. It’s clear it is an important letter because of how the lady’s left fingertips rise involuntarily to the tip of her chin, the delicate lowering of her jaw. I love the tender expression of the maid, as if unaware of status—as if there’s a sisterly bond that easily and naturally transcends every boundary between them.

  I can’t completely embrace this painting, and it might have to do with the fact that the background, for once, is left dark and undefined, so the figures hover in nebulous space. Some critics have assumed that the painting was unfinished simply because of this uncharacteristic background, and some, including Gowing, have even doubted the painting’s attribution. Looking at it, I realize how crucial geometry is in Vermeer. The placement of figures in such exquisitely calibrated relation to each other, and to the rake of light across the textured, whitewashed wall—this is the ground that sustains the vision. Its absence here is jarring—at least it is for me, accustomed as I am by now to Vermeer’s typical whitewashed wall.

  But the ermine trim is astonishingly plush and convincing, as are the dramatically shadowed folds of the yellow fabric, her beaded chignon, and the exquisite translucence of her pearls. I’m amused by how the lady’s handwriting on the page breaks with perspective—it doesn’t slant as it sh
ould with the letter laid flat on the desk before her. Instead, the lines run vertically toward us, in order to keep the lines from blurring together. We’re not meant to be conscious of this, of course, and probably most viewers aren’t. It’s another example of what Kees termed “photoshopping.”

  The West Gallery, with its two Rembrandts (The Polish Rider and a late self-portrait), a Velasquez, an El Greco, and a Goya, is probably as fine a roomful of Old Masters as one could find this side of the Louvre. Mistress and Maid hangs comfortably and nobly among such company. It’s the last painting Henry Clay Frick purchased before he died.

  I sit on one of two creaky, pale-green, period divans that face each other across the midst of the gallery. Above them an enormous pair of luminous Turners—the sunrise Dieppe harbor, the sunset Cologne harbor—attempt to out-dazzle each other. I rest my legs for a delicious minute, then rise and proceed through the central courtyard back to the main entrance. The restroom is down two flights of stairs, a nice, old-fashioned, white marble room. While washing my hands, I glance at the blear-eyed, scruffy, asymmetrical face in the mirror. It looks like I slept in the bus station. (Actually, it was the Leo House, a Catholic hotel in Chelsea.) But those blue eyes are steady and startlingly ferocious. My fingertips press down firmly on the edge of the sink.