“But you might as well see the castle as long as you’re here,” she says. “It’s magnificent.”
Visiting the “proud keep of Windsor” entails a constant climb— it was built that way to make it easier to defend. You enter through St. George’s Gate, and then loop clockwise uphill around the base of the Round Tower toward the State Apartments, where most of the treasures are to be seen. The motte is fifty feet tall, now a steeply terraced slope, with scenic little falls sidestepping brink to brink through ornamental oaks. The old tower on top carries the weight of Arthurian legend (some consider Windsor Hill the site of the original Round Table), and was built by Edward III for the Knights of the Royal Garter. Halfway around, I stop, glancing back into the Lower Ward, at St. George’s Chapel, with its Gothic spires and vaults— which Ruskin calls “a very visible piece of romance”—along with the Curfew Tower, the cloisters, and the park-like common.
But I take all of this in rather sullenly. My thoughts are elsewhere. What to do about The Music Lesson? I have only two and a half days left; I don’t want to miss it.
In the State Apartments, I pass through the room housing Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, an immense scale model with working lifts, plumbing, and electricity. Soon I’ll wander the Drawings Gallery, with its several pieces by Leonardo Da Vinci, through stateroom after stateroom, wing after wing on a scale I have never seen before—an impenetrable hive of empire. Yet, while still in the Dollhouse room, I happen to overhear, coming through the handset of a lady guard, a voice asking to talk to “the gentleman interested in Vermeer.” I step forward, and she hands me the big, walkie-talkie style phone. It is the first guard, reporting that The Music Lesson would be on display at Windsor beginning next week.
“I’ll be gone,” I say. Now I know, the other three paintings will have to suffice.
“Well, at least we got cracking,” he says.
I pass through quickly, in a blur, the hundred staterooms, reception halls for centuries of monarchs, diplomats, presidents; the drawing rooms, armories, bedchambers, and so on; out and out through the Norman Gate again, down to the Lower Ward. In St. George’s Chapel, I admire the choir, where the Order of the Garter convenes, then pause for another moment, impressed by the stiff upright pews, the magnificently carved woodwork above.
In the Chapel’s excellent gift shop, I pick out several gifts for Sophia—a long blue peacock quill pen, a dragon pendant, a hammered pewter spoon—and then I’m out through the Henry XVIII Gate into the street.
It’s already two o’clock and I’m famished, so I look for something promising among the cafés on High Street. A conical candle in a boutique shopfront catches my eye. It’s like the one I’d bought for Sophia in Delft, except sparkly and white, and I have to have it. A block or two later, a sidewalk blackboard in front of a butcher/ rotisserie advertises “minted lamb” in a sideways scrawl, and that sounds almost too perfect. Inside, the counterman says, “Sorry, mate. All outa lamb! ’Ow bout a spit-roasted gammon knuckle? It’ll fill you up!”
“Okay,” I say. “One, uh, gammon knuckle, and a Diet Coke—I mean, Coke Light.”
I sit on a nearby bench in the street outside, and open the paper bag. It’s pig, as it turns out—an outsized, meaty hock the likes of which I hope never to see again. The skin crisped brown and granular with salt, the first bite a shock of spurting grease. Tender fists of smoky, fat meat tear from the bone with each ravenous bite. It’s horribly, unspeakably good. Beneath a white, stone-haunted sky, what else can I do? I tuck into the roast hog, washing it down with deep swigs of soda, and when I’m completely, almost sickeningly satiated, I stuff the bone and the can back into the bag, and return to my hotel.
3. Kenwood House
On Saturday morning, I ride the lift to ground level at Hampstead Station, step out into a vicious wind, then turn to the right straight into it, straight up steep Heath Street. Almost immediately the rain slices through my sweater, and my black umbrella detonates, so I begin to look for shelter. Half a block uphill, in front of Heath Street Baptist Church, an elderly lady in a bright aqua cardigan is fumbling with a blackboard in the doorway: Saturday Morning Coffee/11 am–1pm/Coffee & Biscuits 40p. I duck in right behind her, just as she turns back into the warmth inside the vestibule.
It’s a pleasantly musty nineteenth-century sanctuary, not large. “Care to join us for coffee?”the lady asks, smoothing her platinum hair.
“Yes, please,” I say, and take a seat at one of the three card tables set with tablecloths and silk flowers.
“How do you take it?” she asks.
“Cream and sugar, please.”
“One lump or two?”
“Two.”
Hoping the storm will blow over soon, I stir my coffee, bite into a buttery shortbread cookie, and ask her about the church’s most impressive feature, its stained glass. “Original,” she remarks. She speaks quietly of the congregation’s Sunday dinners for the homeless. I can see what the church means to her—everything. I pass an inexplicably joyful half-hour here, and then the rain has stopped. I’m off across the misting heath, until I come to the sign for the Kenwood House.
The approach to the estate is a winding lane through dripping, rain-drenched woods. I go through what appears to be the back door, get directions to The Guitar Player, and walk through room after room of not-quite dilapidated Victorian splendor. Finally, just past the roped-off library (which has often been a Merchant/Ivory film set), I come to Lord Iveagh’s dining room. The floorboards are quite worn, a bit squeaky, with a worn Ushak carpet. Everything in the room dates from 1800–1820, the majestic Regency chandelier hanging beneath a ceiling high as a school cafeteria. Scarlet patterned velvet walls, carved gilt curtain rods the size of railroad ties. The centerpiece of the room is the iconic Rembrandt self-portrait of 1661; in fact, the curtains and walls have been color-matched to the blood-red tunic Rembrandt is wearing. I read the placard that tells how Rembrandt revised the self-portrait (painted in a mirror, as usual) by touching up his elderly, poverty-stricken, disheveled image later. He also “corrected” the reflected image optically—switching the hand holding the paintbrush from left to right, for instance.
Then I turn toward my right, toward the sunny windows and the wall containing the Vermeer. There are twenty paintings in the room, whose gilt frames coordinate with the other furnishings. The glaring exception is The Guitar Player, with its matte-black frame. But even from across the room, the gilt frame of the painting-within-the-painting stands out clearly. It’s another of the artist’s stylized yet convincing gilt frames—hashed together of gold pointillés— that conveys a strong, intuitive impression of the minute details it actually lacks.
The woman in The Guitar Player reminds me of the lute-player in the Met. Both girls look to their right, out of the painting, as they sit and strum; the implication in both cases is that they play for an absent but possibly nearby lover. The lute-player gazes dreamily into the light, her face illumined though the paint is worn; this girl glances away from the light, her face darkened yet livid. The girl in New York concentrates as she tunes the lute—she seems to gaze idly out the window, or else she gazes toward God and plays for Him. The guitar-player looks toward another, who is in the room listening with her, and she plays for him. Both girls wear pearl earrings and the same fur-trimmed, yellow jacket. Both sit toward the left of the painting, but the guitar-player carries imbalance and asymmetry to an extreme, and seems to move, to lean and turn as I look, almost as if Vermeer were consciously rebelling against the stillness and serenity of his own work. It is a shock, and yet I recognize the gnawing desire to do something, anything, differently from what one has done before—to be someone other than what one has paid the price to become.
Her cheeks are flushed a gaudy, pinkish-orange. The hue seems pointedly artificial compared to the blush of the earlier girls. Her dark, Picasso-like eyes are almond-shaped. The slightly protuberant peak of the forehead is outlined with a very bright highlight, like the upper
most angle of her left cheek and the side of her nose. The face, finally, seems almost brutally rendered. The blurred curls of her fancy, up-to-the-minute hairdo are rendered in fluid, corkscrew brushstrokes. The cut-off right elbow seems the gesture of another artist altogether, if not another century.
Yet there are passages of exquisitely precise description: the illusionism of the glowing pearls, the velvety decadence of the spotted ruff. And the guitar, of course, receives the full treatment—its crisp, staccato, black-and-white inlay that edges both the body and fingerboard lends hard definition to the overall vision. The heart of the painting, the luscious trompe-l’oeil sound hole, is positioned directly over the center of the woman’s body. Her hands carry the burden of expression for her. The curves and segments of her left fingers are composed of unmediated daubs or lozenges of reflected light—an effect that makes the fingers seem even more ethereal than they might in a more literal approach. I marvel at her left hand unconsciously caressing the neck, as each fingertip presses down into each note. The right hand, her most “realistic” feature, is caught as the sound unfolds, the shadow of her extended little finger cast on the guitar the instant she plucks it. But the sound is not simply expressed through a careful blurring of the middle strings. It vibrates everywhere: through the luminous softness of her hands and forearms in motion, the slight clench of her jaw as she concentrates, the lyrical afterthought of her curls. It radiates out through all the colors, tone on tone, through the silver-on-silver folds of her satin dress as it drapes and clings to her right knee. Out through the folds of the yellow jacket, dark gold on a ground of luminous gold, through the gilt frame’s pointillés of luminous gold on a ground of darker gold.
And again, there’s a darkened window, but on the right this time. The angle of light, from over the painter’s right shoulder is direct, uncomfortably direct, and in the context of the oeuvre seems almost willfully perverse. The way in which we’re encouraged to stare straight into her face seems to veer as far as possible away from the discretion Vermeer has habitually shown to his women. Perhaps also because of the direct, single-sourced light, there’s a modern and garish intensity to the style—the greenish tinge of her upper chest, the mask-like face all shadow and glare and blush.
Not another soul is here. Rembrandt, Vermeer, and myself.
But, no matter how long I look, for me, The Guitar Player remains a disconcerting painting. Energy is concentrated in the left half of the painting, radiating toward the right, but the woman glances the other way. She’s right here, knees at my fingertips, with nothing in between, and yet she has nothing to do with me. Nor does she play for herself—this creature of darkness—but for another, whom I cannot see.
4. The Man in the Oilskin Parka
I’m sitting on the settee in the middle of the room when an American, probably in his thirties, strides in. He casually makes a beeline toward the Vermeer in front of me. He’s wearing a dark-green British oilskin parka, with a matching wide-brim rain hat. He’s slender, with good looks to match his crisp, appropriate clothes. I nod in a dreamy muse. He leans solicitously for a while, checking back with me a couple of times to make sure he’s not interfering with my view. He’s a bit self-conscious; he makes too much of it. When he apologizes for disturbing me, I say, “No, it’s all right. Go ahead; I’ll be here for a while.” I gaze at his back.
After a few minutes of close study, he comes back to the center of the room and stands beside me. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” he says. “I’ve never seen another like it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But it’s not a Vermeer.”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “It is. It is a Vermeer.” He looks at me with faint alarm.
After a nervous moment, I try again. “That’s not what I meant. I mean it’s just so odd. Why he placed her so far off-center … and with that greenish pallor, she’s so unappealing.”
But I have spoken too quietly (as I often do), and he says, “Yes, the color makes her so appealing. There’s usually something in the foreground, too, something in front of them, as if to protect them,” he adds. “But not this time.”
“The lion-head chair-backs,” I say. As I say it, I realize there’s a single lion-head behind the guitar player, reduced to a simple, dark silhouette. Still, to me, the repertoire—the windows, the chair-backs, and Vermeer’s whole dynamic language—seems shuttered in these last great works.
“Or the table with the Persian carpet in The Music Lesson,” he says, “which really adds depth when you see it in person.”
“You’ve seen that?” I ask, suddenly alert again. “I walked all over Windsor Castle looking for that painting two days ago.”
“I saw it last week, at Buckingham Palace. In the Queen’s Gallery,” he says with a shrug. He pauses and looks at me. “Around the left side of the palace.”
I thank him, smiling: he cannot know how much he has helped me.
After he leaves, I give it another half hour.
When these travels began, I was pretty sure which Vermeers appealed to me most strongly. The work that reached out to me was the same early to mid-career work that reaches so many others—the lovely, pensive women and the two landscapes. I came to London curious about how I’d react to the later works and to what seems to be a falling off.
The feeling I struggle with is not disappointment in The Guitar Player, but a vertigo-like sense of disorientation. It isn’t simply that the light we didn’t even know we were looking for (and yet so powerfully find in Vermeer) isn’t there anymore. In the later work, the faces are not simply unlit, they are dark. Even the windows that would have lit the faces are shuttered. The terms of the experiment have changed; the language has changed. Even the famous stillness has changed, so that what is captured is not a face at all, but the blur of a sidelong glance, reverberating through space.
Musical instruments have moved to the fore. Here, the numinous guitar dominates the composition. Virginals and the viola da gamba play prominent roles in the paintings I’m about to see, The Music Lesson and London’s two National Gallery paintings, A Lady Seated at a Virginal and A Lady Standing at a Virginal. The instruments no longer accompany the subjects; they are the subjects, just as in many modernist paintings.
This is perhaps my issue with the later work. I’ve come to Vermeer primarily for what his paintings teach me about myself, by placing me in the grip of intimacy, of romance, and allowing me to think about my own responses. But the context has changed, and I feel more than a little lost now.
5. Maria
I exit through the front this time, and cross over the steaming, emerald heath again, past Spaniard’s Inn, haunt of the Romantics, on my right. When I come to a fork in the road, I turn left down East Heath, rather than back down High Street. It is all village on my right, the backs of the brick rowhouses. The great heath, with its paths and pastures, prams and joggers and leashed dogs, is on my left. I come to Keats’s Grove, an island of ghostly sycamores with great, flat leaves, then round the corner to Keats’s House. It consists of two white Regency cottages: one belonging to Keats’s friend Charles Brown, who took him in when he was ill; the other to the family of his true love, Fanny Brawne. The cottages were later joined to form a single abode. Keats lived here from 1818 to 1820, which means he spent nearly his entire writing life here.
Vermeer is a new love; Keats a first love. I’ve never been one to make pilgrimages; I don’t much care to visit author’s homes. The life isn’t in the shrine; it’s in the work. But because I’m here, I allow myself an hour to traipse through the rooms. It is a comfortable, studiously quiet house, with creaky floorboards. I look at the painting of Keats by Severn in the sitting room. Upstairs, next to Keats’s bedroom, is a glass case containing mementoes of his romance with Fanny. I’m riveted by the gold engagement ring that Keats, flat broke and showing the first signs of tuberculosis, gave the lovely eighteen-year-old. The story goes that Fanny never took off the ring, despite her marriage a few years after Keats’s death in Rome. I’
d always pictured this ring—its gem a lowly garnet stone, all he could afford—as humble, a peasant offering. In fact I find it rather sophisticated, its open scrollwork carved in a beautifully expressive, abstract style. The stone itself is quite worn.
Writing to her, Keats said, “Indeed I think a real Love is enough to occupy the wildest heart …”
I walk out into the garden. There’s little to see, besides beds of violets and the plum tree beneath which Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.” (This tree is a graft from the original tree, actually.) I rummage in the depths of my backpack for my snack, a bruised red pear saved from breakfast at the hotel. I sit on a bench and eat it. Leaving, I turn left toward High Street, the main drag, and Hampstead Station. Remembering how I’d climbed the hill toward Kenwood, I turn left downhill and walk for a block or two, but I don’t recognize anything in the dense and cheerful profusion of cafés, flower shops, sundry boutiques.
Out of one of them, a woman suddenly appears, is walking next to me—a beautiful woman about my age in formal black raincoat, ivory scarf. (I’m in my Rockports, jeans, green heather sweater.) Both of us are walking rather quickly downhill, both of us are going somewhere. I make up my mind to catch her with a longer stride or two. “Excuse me, can you tell me where Hampstead Station is?” I ask.
“Where are you trying to go?” she says, without breaking pace. Her voice is low and as indeterminately exotic as her darkly swept-back looks, the clack/clack of her heels on brick.
“London,” I say.
She laughs softly, out of the corner of her glance. “This is London,” she says, with a quick, open wave of a hand encompassing everything.
“I mean, you know, the center. Trafalgar. The National Gallery,” I say.
“Hampstead Station is back that way,” she says, pointing behind us up the hill. “But you might as well keep going to Belsize Park, it’s the same distance either way.”
Travels in Vermeer Page 11