Travels in Vermeer (14 page)

2. Windsor Castle

My breakfast is “full English” (eggs, mushrooms, bangers, beans). I decide, over my eggs, that I can't think about the other three paintings until I've seen
The Music Lesson.
A refill of coffee, and I'm eagerly off. Within fifteen minutes, changing from tube to train at Waterloo Station, I'm rolling out of London, out of the mouth of a long, dark tunnel and into the blinding sun, toward Windsor, toward the magical painting. I admire the gabled roofs, the cockeyed chimneys, and the narrow little gardens behind the suburban row houses west of town. Then I burrow into Gowing again: “In
The Music Lesson
, instead of human matter, the chief object of the painter's scrutiny is the great perspective.”

It's true that the figures appear far at the back of an unusually deep version of Vermeer's room. Zoomed-in on my laptop, they look small and remote, and the face of the man appears unreachably lost, on the other side of rapture.

In a half hour I make out the castle from far across the Thames Valley, the great Round Tower dominating the river bluffs and the town of Eton. The Union Jack flies above, which means the queen isn't here. I file off the train, and within a few hundred feet stop for coffee—there is a tasteful, high-end, indoor/outdoor row of tourist shops tucked in beneath the gates. I sip a frothy latte. Then I make the short climb to Windsor.

The entrance ramps guide me into a ticket office/information center/security check building. While buying my ticket, I ask the civil servant, in his bright blue uniform, where I can find Vermeer's
The Music Lesson.
He says there are no Vermeers at Windsor. I feel a stab of catch-22 panic; I hope he's wrong. It's a big castle, I think. While running my card, he tries his best to explain the nature of the Royal Collection—in which relatively few paintings, at any given time, are shown to the public, and those that are shown rotate among the royal galleries at the whim of the queen. After I'm seated inside, next to the information desk, he disappears downstairs to make some calls, to find out about the painting. It's his lunch break anyway, he says. He'll be right back.

The second he's gone, a small voice from somewhere speaks clearly. “We have the same tastes, you and I.” A tiny, pixie-ish docent sitting behind the counter, swivels toward me. She's less than five feet tall, with short, silvery hair and angelic, watery blue eyes. I hadn't even noticed her before.

“I fell in love with Vermeer when I was eighteen, in Amsterdam,” she almost whispers, fixing me with an intense gaze. “The instant I saw
The Milkmaid
.”

“Same here,” I say. “In the Rijksmuseum.”

She says she had heard on the radio that very morning that
The Music Lesson
is in fact coming to Windsor in a few days; she's excited because she'd always wanted to see it. “I can't wait,” she confides.

After a few minutes, the guard returns to report that no one has answered his calls.

“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 uppermost 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.