Travels in Vermeer

by Michael White

  I check in again with Officer and Laughing Girl before I leave.

  4. Fifth Avenue

  I cross Fifth Avenue in order to be next to the park as I float the next few blocks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On such a high-spirited day—the cherry trees in blossom; Stuart Little’s pond a thicket of outsized, remote-controlled yachts; all the playgrounds going fulltilt—it might seem unlikely that I could simply walk next to the park and not go inside it, but I do. The rest of New York’s Vermeers, the rest of America’s Vermeers, are a couple of minutes away. The Met has more of them than any other museum in the world, five in all—and since the Frick and the Met are so close to each other, I can’t imagine any Vermeer lover not wanting to see all in one fell swoop, as I’m in the act of doing, this sunny, kite-flying afternoon.

  My left elbow occasionally grazes the stone-and-mortar park wall. The top of it is peaked like the ridge of a house, and when I touch it, it feels like sandstone—faint grit lingering on the fingertip. Swept along on a tide of gratefulness that I can’t get to the bottom of, I amble purposefully. For once in my life, I’m precisely where I need to be, and I know it.

  This is a little like walking through the streets of The Hague toward the Mauritshuis—toward The Girl with a Pearl Earring— except far better. It is as if, halfway through my journey, I find myself suspended midway on a bridge between two great collections of Vermeer, between two great museums, two worlds. I know every footstep on the root-buckled paving stones for the grace it truly is. I can go as fast or as slow as I want on this bridge of the present, so I choose to walk rather slowly.

  Over the wall, in a playground there, two little girls about Sophia’s age are spinning together on a tire swing—the type held by three chains, with a swivel above. They whoop and shriek, pink sweaters and pigtails whirling straight outward with centrifugal force. Suddenly, I ardently wish Sophia were here.

  I do what parents do at such times: I fantasize about a trip I intend to take with her, maybe in a year or two. A classic trip to the city; why hadn’t I thought of that before? But where will we go? The obvious places for kids are usually best: the Central Park Zoo, the Statue of Liberty, American Girl Place New York, a walk on the High Line. That should do it.

  And yet my mind is restless. I’m still thinking about the Frick, especially about Officer and Laughing Girl. I’m trying to process what I’ve seen. I remember a phrase that Gowing uses in discussing this painting: he says it reflects an “unhappy jocularity.” Perhaps he is speaking more about genre—the procuresses, the leering, drunken soldiers of the “merry company” scenes—than the actual canvas. Certainly the officer is a hugely discomfiting figure, his great bulk exaggerated by the big black hat, and his enormous, crumpled right hand. And his darkness is accentuated by placing him in such a luminous room, in front of such a luminous face.

  But I wonder if I am projecting. The wine, the questionable encounter, and the girl’s apparent naivety—the openness of her fetching smile, the translucent, glowing blush of her cheeks–all trouble me. The girl could hardly seem more vulnerable. There was a time I might not have felt this way. But I am older now, I’ve taught too many young women in my classes, and my heart’s been permanently melted by Sophia’s arrival in my life.

  I’m floating uptown—shimmering water on my left and the copper-green roof of the boathouse—but she prevails; the face of human good prevails. I felt this at first glance, and still feel it now. I can’t forget her touching gaze, the way Vermeer portrays her lazy right eye, drifting slightly out. It’s the sort of observation that lingers in the mind and adds warmth to so many of his women; it makes me cherish them. I might even call the effect spiritual: she seems unfocussed in a prophetic way, seeing past what brings the officer to her, and past, perhaps, what he is capable of seeing in himself. She finds his presence riveting, it’s clear, but at the same time sees straight through him, and me, to a secret apparent only to herself. Despite the built-in conflict, every orthogonal leads back to her—that guileless smile that fills the room with light.

  Over the park wall, I glimpse a side-view of the colossal bronze sculpture of Alice in Wonderland rising at the far end of the pond: Alice surrounded by the Rabbit, the Hatter, the Cheshire Cat.

  There is your model for random encounters, I tell myself. There are your transformations.

  Some of Tenniel’s delectably surreal drawings come to mind, the ones I pore over so happily with Sophia in my lap: Alice swimming for her life in the Pool of Tears, Alice dolefully holding a pig dressed as a baby, the outlandish Hatter at the Tea Party.

  Then the sculpture is behind me. Straight ahead, I make out the oddly warted trunks of a sycamore copse—no, it’s London planes— the swollen boles of their bodies slick and black as toads. The white stone flagship of museums looms beyond.

  5. A Question

  Upstairs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first Vermeer I come to is a very early (1656–7) genre piece called A Maid Asleep. This one painting keeps company in a central gallery full of Dutch Masters. The other four Vermeers hang side-by-side in the last room of the wing. Maybe the curators felt A Maid Asleep is of a different breed altogether. It is similar to Nicholas Maes’s sublime Girl Peeling Apples that hangs next to it here. In fact, the vocabulary of this early painting is, as Gowing writes, “not essentially different” from that of Vermeer’s contemporaries.

  The painting depicts a young girl, presumably a maid, at a table strewn with wineglasses, a fruit bowl, pitcher, cutlery, and other ambiguous objects. Her head nods forward, and is propped on her right hand. If we’re supposed to see the girl in Officer and Laughing Girl as a prostitute, then we’re probably supposed to see this one as a drunk. She’s robust and solid, somewhat like The Milkmaid in stature. She’s wearing a black cap and what seems an overly fancy dress of scarlet velvet. In fact, she’s adrift in a sea of scarlet: what I can see of the riveted leather seatback behind her appears to be the same shade of red as her dress; the expensive, expansive Persian throw crumpled over the table is also mostly red; and a bowl before her is filled with red apples. All this deep red around her blurs the essential boundaries between that small part of her body that we can make out, and the disheveled table before her.

  The background of A Maid Asleep is an odd one. To the right, in the background of the scene, is a partially open door, through which we view a farther, brighter room, with a covered table and mirror on a wall above it. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland-style keyhole view that lends the painting depth and light. Above the girl, to the left, there’s a small corner of a painting-within-the-painting. Because the canvas is badly abraded in places, all I can make out for certain is a foot—it turns out to be the foot of the same cupid who hangs dimly in the background of Girl Interrupted in Her Music, and who will finally appear clearly in A Lady Standing at a Virginal. Here, the obscure foot can barely be made out. Lying just to the right of it is a discarded and shadowy white mask, propped upright.

  It’s thrilling to me to see so many motifs make their first appearance and to recognize them as such: the cupid, the mask (which also reappears dramatically in the late The Art of Painting), the mirror, the finials, even what seems to be the corner of a map hanging on the wall toward the right. Here is the vocabulary—all of it, like the cupid’s foot, making an agonizingly tentative and cryptic entrance into the painter’s gaze.

  Critics have not been kind to this woman. Arthur Wheelock characterizes her appearance as “melancholic,” “despondent,” even “slothful.” In person, her presence is remarkably expressive, but expressive of nothing in particular, the heaviness and pallor of her face vividly registering the rush of passion, alcohol, or simply the headiness of youth. After all, she’s dressed sexily in red, with décolletage, framed by the cupid behind, and by the table rather wildly set with wineglasses before her. I can see the nature of her sleep as a drunken stupor, a fantasy, a catnap, or even as a sham, a pretense at sleep as a lover approaches—perhaps this is what the
mask implies. But I keep changing my mind, as I did with Officer and Laughing Girl, and never can decide. And in my own relationships, no matter how often I sift through my memories, it’s nearly impossible to tell who was the pursuer, who was the pursued.

  Radiographs show that Vermeer once included a gentleman standing in the farther room, and a dog in the lower right, staring toward the man. The dog was covered up with a leather-upholstered Spanish chair, with a rather vaguely realized pillow with gold piping propped against it. How would these figures have affected the emotional chemistry of the painting, had they remained? What happens when you strip away such props? But perhaps it isn’t so easy to strip them away. In painting out the dog in the doorway, what if the painter allows the partially open door itself to function as a sentinel; what if he decides to let the lion-head finials of the chair present themselves as they do in later works? In painting out the man in the far room, what if he allows the mirror there to assert its depths and truth-telling function in a way that foretells the mirrors in The Music Lesson or Woman Holding a Balance? And though one must take the artist’s final version of a painting as authoritative, perhaps nothing can ever be unpainted anyway, each image inextricably connected to the one before, back to the first thought or daub of paint on the canvas. Perhaps this discovery is the true thrill of the painting: Vermeer discovering how to unpaint the genre scene, uncovering, as he does, its latent resonance.

  On the table, one object especially begins to bother me. It has a silver handle on each end, and lies diagonally amongst the clutter of the still-life—glass and chiffon. I can’t, for the life of me, figure it out. It looks like a very short walking stick.

  As I’m standing there, a young girl, a college freshman perhaps, approaches. She’s wearing really, really tattered jeans and a black T-shirt. She’s plump; her hair is cut in a severe and dramatically black-tinted pageboy. When she comes to A Maid Asleep, she takes a creased black Moleskine journal out of her back pocket, opens it, and begins to flick/flick rapid notes and drawings. The journal is already filled cover-to-cover, and stuffed to the gills with extra scraps of paper. I give her a moment, and then, because I decide she is clearly smart, ask: “There’s one thing I can’t identify. Do you have any idea what this is?” I trace the silver-handled object with the tip of my thumb. (Unfortunately, I come too close to the surface of the uncovered canvas, and a guard promptly appears. Warning nod; apologetic nod.)

  She steps up and regards the object steadfastly for a minute. Bites her lip. Her eyes are quick and nearly black—like the eyes of Girl Interrupted in Her Music. Finally, she glances at me and shakes her head.

  Thanks. See you, I say with a nod.

  6. Room 12

  Room 12 has an end-of-the-rainbow feeling. It’s spacious, perfectly lit, with a comfortably cushioned bench, where I can sit and contemplate Vermeer’s women as long as I like.

  Together on one wall, right to left, are Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Study of a Young Woman, and Woman with a Lute. These are mature works, from the 1660s. On its own, on the wall on the left, is Allegory of Faith. I’m moving slowly from right to left, starting with the remarkably well-preserved Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, the first of the thirteen Vermeers to enter the United States (in 1889).

  It is a painting of great clarity and harmony, one of Gowing’s “pearl pictures.” A bonneted woman at her toilet stands in the streaming light, her left hand resting on a gilded pitcher, her right hand partially concealed by the exquisite, blue-tinted leaded casement she seems to be opening. Walter Liedtke, a curator of the Met, speaks for most when he calls this woman an “icon of domesticity.” There is a map behind her, a jewelry box (with a strand of pearls just visible), and a carpeted table before her: it’s an upper-class scene, a cousin of Woman Holding a Balance. The shimmering pitcher and basin have an optically determined, liquid quality, like the chandelier in An Artist in His Studio. They dominate the space; they glimmer, neither near nor far, like objects in a dream.

  Gowing, though, makes a unique and controversial assessment that cuts to the quick: he calls this painting the “most primitive” of its type. He says that Vermeer “falters when the crucial detail” (the head) is reached. And compared to so many of Vermeer’s other heads, with their powerful claims on my attention, this one does look rather lifeless to me. I realize that this is partly the point: she’s an ideal, blocked out in light and shade. Still, in contrast to the magical equilibrium of The Milkmaid and Woman Holding a Balance the figure in this painting seems all too settled to me. She stands a little stiffly and doll-like, a figure of sunlight, lacking a distinct physiognomy.

  That can’t be said about the painting next to it. Study of a Young Woman is a head of comparable dimensions to The Girl with a Pearl Earring, and is often characterized as a likely pendant (or companion painting) for the earlier work. Many believe that the sitters for both paintings were daughters of the painter. It is also, as John Michael Montias dryly wrote, “a portrait if ever there was one.” Her wide-set eyes, short nose, straight mouth, and jutting jaw are anything but idealized, or conventionally pretty. Yet the tone of the painting toward its subject is tender, even reverent. The characterization here could hardly be more different from that of The Girl with a Pearl Earring. Instead of the other’s erotic intensity, this one is all softness and innocence, her enormous, liquid eyes brimming with dream. She is someone’s sister; she is someone’s daughter. I walk away unscathed from her, which might be the point. Unscathed, but not untouched.

  Moving to the left, Woman with a Lute contains a single figure who seems to be the same girl with wide-set eyes depicted in Study of a Young Woman, though this painting allows her more distance and is more flattering to her. What’s unusual about the painting is how far Vermeer has gone to shelter the girl: by the sentinel finials in the foreground, dramatically enlarged in perspective; by the bulk of the table she sits behind; by the heap of blue tablecloth; and by the lute itself, that she holds before her chest as she tunes it, glancing sidelong, oblivious, into the north light streaming in. Though she is alone for now, the lute, the strewn sheet music, and the viola de gamba on the floor suggest imminent passion—as in Girl Interrupted in Her Music. Like that painting, this one seems dim and subaqueous and is badly abraded, especially in the foreground, which is very murky. And also like that painting, this one also has a few very well preserved bright touches, especially the huge pearl earrings worn by the girl, her pearl necklace, and the yellow, ermine-trimmed jacket, making yet another appearance. There’s an extraordinary wistfulness in these details. Her dreamy, expectant mood as she watches for her suitor, her relaxed, unselfconscious pose and the grace of her fingers turning the keys of the lute, all capture the anticipatory joy of romance better than anything else I’ve seen.

  But this also has to be the most damaged Vermeer I’ve seen, and it’s probably the most damaged Vermeer in the world. Gowing pronounces the painting a “ruin.” And of course, he is right, it is a shame. But then again, I remember Gowing’s insights on The Girl with a Pearl Earring. Toward the back of his book, he discusses the way this image, this beauty, is constructed, even reprinting a radiograph that shows the underlying form of white lead, a blunt, mysterious shape quite different from the finished head. This is, for me, the most thrilling moment in his book, leading to such rapturous passages as: “the radiography of painting has never shown a form in itself as wonderful as this.” What the radiograph reveals is the bare notation of her glance, her being—the candescent gleam of her eye, the architecture of bone, the mouth in all its nakedness, its need—laid down as it is seen, not yet translated into something we call a “girl.” Here, it is clear, if Vermeer ever used the camera, he used it. There is no drawing, no design, only light transcribed on the visible weave of the canvas. Much of what the painting tells us is a result of the thin, opaque layers that bring her conventional prettiness into being; much of what we feel, however, comes from this naked image, the primal record just concealed beneat
h.

  It might seem perverse when I suggest that paintings like Woman with Lute or Girl Interrupted in Her Music or The Girl with a Pearl Earring benefit somehow, for me, from their poor state of conservation. I don’t feel exactly that way: of course it is tragic that some of the Vermeer masterpieces are so badly damaged. Paintings aren’t like the Grand Canyon, which owes its sublimity to erosion. And yet a Vermeer is a Vermeer all the way down, like the face beneath the face in the head of The Girl with a Pearl Earring: each brushstroke yoked to the one before and after. So what can be truly lost? Perhaps it’s enough to say that the damages to the painting are unfortunate—as are the damages any of us receives in the travels of our lives. And yet such damages can also be a testament to the power of the original vision, the deepest source of beauty.

  In any case, my favorite painting here, in Room 12, has somehow shed about ninety per cent of its paint. The contours of the woman’s head—across the top of her forehead and hairdo—appear to have been deliberately smudged, not by the process of time so much as by two powerful thumbs pushing in hard, as if to drive her outline into the whiteness of the wall behind. The lute itself, especially, has been ravaged—reduced to the rough shape of body and neck in the woman’s hands. I make out one or two of its keys—she is tuning the instrument, string by string—but not the strings themselves, and the sound hole is more a mere gesture or shadow than image. (Later this year, I’ll see The Guitar Player, in London’s Kenwood House. It’s an extraordinary example of what Vermeer can do with musical instruments—among its six strings of varying thicknesses, one can even make out which seem to be quivering as they are strummed, and which are not!)

  But if this lute and the woman herself are mere ghosts, they are resonant ghosts. It’s true she is barely here, the body of the lute, and all it might signify, held lightly, lightly, in her wraithlike hands. As she keeps one ear on the note she plucks—as she carefully tunes the pitch of the string—she looks sidelong out through the window, into the watery radiance. One might think it’s an expectant look, and the woman’s dress and her pearls seem to support this—but it also seems a natural reflex of consciousness, a flicker of feeling that leads her sidelong into the distance. Her dreamy, wide-set eyes and smudged head underscore her vulnerability, the quick of a moment lit upon blue shadows.