Travels in Vermeer (7 page)

It isn't a detail from the canvas, but the canvas itself—the vertical rectangle, reduced in size to cover the field of her back. There is a heightened vividness to the colors—white and yellow and green and pink—as a result of being translated from oil to needle-and-ink, and it is impressive, if unsettling.

“Wow,” I say.

“I don't regret it,” she says. She stands, slips the shirt back on without the bra, and buttons it halfway up.

She opens up, in a rush, it seems, about the period after her divorce. Her father's death that same year. How she'd inherited the corporation, and had had a crisis, partly because she didn't really want to retire from teaching. And yet, she wasn't teaching at the time—and the demands of being principal had been too stressful, anyway. She tells me how she'd done it, taken the property on, out of the blue, as an experiment, as part of a slew of midlife changes, and had discovered she liked it, had a knack for it—her head filled with a million projects, every day, these days. The vision, then the satisfaction of seeing the actual results. And the skydiving, the tattoo. “These things are a part of me now.” Still, it's her dream to get back to the classroom someday, she says. And she will, she says.

My own changes seem comparatively simple, partly because I leave out the agony of my divorce. I tell her only about my joys: the hours with my daughter (I show her my wallet photos). Looking at Vermeer. And my own love of teaching, which I can't foresee leaving. Ever. This is something we share.

It's late. Hours must have passed. She offers me a firm, goodnight hug—a moment, a genuine moment of warmth.

After she retires, I take a long, luxurious bath in the claw-foot tub. I float, I drift, my legs stretched out in the almost-scalding water. What an odd song, I think. This evening, this meeting, had not been what I'd hoped for, not what I would have chosen for myself, but it was lovely in its own gentle way.

Next morning, Anne has an early meeting with contractors. At 7:45, I draw the door shut behind me. After I pull out onto the street, I stop at a Kwik-Mart, just down the hill. While the car is filling up, I grab a large, bad coffee, with an Otis Spunkmeyer blueberry muffin. Thus armed, I drive five hours back across the state.

The broad-crowned pines become a solid wall as the road levels out on the coastal plain.

When I get home, there's an email from Anne. How much she had enjoyed our night, hearing about my daughter, talking about art. Next time, it will be her turn, she promises, to make the drive.

I write back,
It was my pleasure
. Then I sketch out my schedule over the next few weeks for her. I tell how amazing she is, how much I want to see her again. That's what I say.

But no one makes the drive, and she never writes again.

W
ASHINGTON
, D. C.

[
December
]

1. The Studio

I'm walking through the peculiarly cold, damp air of Washington, D. C., on a rainy winter morning, December 26. My car is parked a few blocks from the Mall. Christmas had quietly passed, my holiday ending when I dropped Sophia off at her mom's new townhouse, promptly at two on Christmas afternoon. A pall of sentimental wood smoke hung on the gray air. This year, the new, younger husband, Hans, answered the door and let Sophia in. His smile was raw and cautious, and he didn't know whether to try to shake my hand. I half-raised my own hand, as if to wave, then backed away.

These are miserable moments. Anyone can see that he is a better match for Sara than I ever was. It's the aftermath of the divorce, with little relief in the feeling of defeat.

I've driven seven hours to see
Woman Holding a Balance
.

I've been to Washington before. In fact I was born here, in 1956, when my dad was teaching for a year at Georgetown, and I've been back many times. No matter: in the same way a painting becomes something else when you come to it in need, so cities can come alive for us and reveal their hidden worlds. But not this one, not today.

Now that I'm middle-aged, I think sometimes of Donald Justice's poem “Men at Forty.” It begins:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

“The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to,” I think, as I walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I linger, for a moment, in front of the United States Navy Memorial. It's a plaza surrounded with an arrangement of flagpoles and patriotic, heroic bas-reliefs. I imagine it might've held more interest for me in an earlier life. Maybe when I was eighteen or nineteen, and in the Navy myself. Maybe not.

I turn toward the domed National Gallery on the Mall, and cross the street. The Cabinet Galleries within offer a permanent exhibition containing the four Vermeers, part of a Dutch suite that opened in 1995. The space was built expressly for the intimate Dutch and Flemish “cabinet paintings.” The term refers to small paintings, often actually kept in cabinets, such as Pieter de Hooch's
A Dutch Courtyard,
Paulus Potter's
A Farrier's Shop,
and Adriaen van Ostade's
The Cottage Dooryard
. Vermeer comes last, in this lineage, like an exclamation mark.

But immediately on entering the museum from the ground-floor Constitution Avenue entrance, I come to a small placard signpost of Vermeer's
Girl with a Red Hat
and the words “Dutch Painting” in red. An arrow points into the sculpture gallery. The Dutch suite is on the second floor, which is the main floor, but it turns out, due to a special exhibition, a small sampling of the Dutch and Flemish paintings, including the Vermeers, is now on temporary display here.

A moment later, I once again feel the shock of stepping into a room lit by Vermeers. From left to right are
Girl with a Red Hat, Woman Holding a Balance,
and
Woman with a Flute
. The small size of these paintings is startling.
Red Hat,
painted on a wooden panel, like the similar
Flute,
is only about nine by seven inches.
Woman Holding a Balance
is one of the many Vermeers that seem much bigger than they really are. But it's about twice the size of the two tiny paintings on each side of it. These three hang crowded together in a tiny room, with a handful of other tiny Golden Age works, including Jan Philips Van Thielsen's astonishing
Rose and Tulip in a Glass Vase,
and Pieter Brueghel the Elder's
River Landscape
. The fourth Vermeer, a larger, opulent canvas called
A Woman Writing
hangs just around a corner, in the next room.

One advantage of the temporary grouping is that the room is absolutely quiet and intimate; I feel alone with the paintings, as if under glass. I stare and stare. Because
Woman Holding a Balance
is a masterpiece, because I want to start with something less majestic and work up, I ignore it at first. I fold my corduroy jacket over my arm, put on my reading glasses, and focus on
Girl with a Red Hat
.

The pull of the girl's feverish, apparitional glance seems out of proportion to its tiny size, its colors, anything definable. I'd begun to feel comfortable in Vermeer's room, the corner with cool light falling from left to right, its lovely girl, its measured quietness. But none of that holds true here, in this very different scene, and I don't know why. The immediate connection is
The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
the other passionately confrontational glance. And in fact these works, along with the
Girl with a Flute
and the
Study of a Young Woman,
in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, have much in common. They are sometimes considered “tronies,” a Dutch genre that art critic Alejandro Vergara defines as “paintings of busts or heads, generally wearing hats or exotic clothes and depicting anonymous or fictive characters.” Tronies weren't considered portraits—or even finished paintings—but demonstrations of skill for the open market.

Two or three times, then, Vermeer's magic wand was left on the shelf. Which is to say the gaze—the exquisitely calibrated practice of the studio, finely tuned as it was to strip the veil from the appearances of things—was left on the shelf in favor of a radically different method. And
we
are the unexpected subject—
we,
rather than the enchanted room, are what is seen into. The barriers the paintings erect are turned inside out, and figures like this fiery woman reach out to us passionately across the fourth wall and into our own dreams.

I'm standing before
Red Hat,
jotting my impressions in my Marble notebook. What I see is focused centrally, the red hat a curved swathe of lacerating, neon red that, on closer inspection, turns out to be composed of several graduated tints, turning at the edges to feathery brush-flecks. The girl's cloak is a sumptuous ultramarine, with patterns of white and yellow. The center of the painting is not her dark eyes—that seem actually to recede beneath the shadow of the hat—but her remarkably lush, full-lit, and full-lipped mouth. All her forwardness is projected there, surrounded by curious highlights. On each side, for instance, she's wearing enormous, hollow, glass-pearl earrings, like the exquisite, almost invisible earring in
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
. The shape is entirely implied by the vaguely comma-shaped touch of white lead that reads as reflection and contour. The ornament, the romance is nearly ghost or memory.

Beneath the chin—precisely defined along the right-hand, illumined edge, but shadow-smudged on the left—she's wearing a translucent lace scarf, nothing more than an incandescent, smoke-like swirl. Toward the left, as the scarf slips into shadow, it disappears, except for a few patches of optically-blurred white light.

The girl's lush mouth is perhaps even more provocative than the mouth of
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
, but her nose complicates things. She has been called “somewhat androgynous” by Walter Liedtke (a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and that certainly applies to her rather small eyes and long Dutch nose, which is straight-bridged, with slightly large nostrils. It's at odds with her delicate, yet arrestingly sensuous lips. Her mouth and nose are linked by a strikingly defined, sunlit cleft on the upper lip, itself part of her idiosyncratic look. Because of all these complications, it might be difficult for me to call the girl pretty, exactly, but neither does this diminish her. And I'm not off the hook. Her eyes bore into me, a moment's dead level appraisal from arm's length, over her right shoulder—just as the Mauritshuis girl glances from across her own left shoulder. The scale of both paintings puts me within inches of a face, a gaze, which sees through me completely.

But the shadowed gaze of this tiny girl gives nothing up—unlike the other's eyes, which give away all. The upper two-thirds of her face dissolves, the right ear little more than a beige semi-circle. She's wearing no makeup to bring out her eyes; and her forehead, with no visible brows or lashes, has a smooth, masklike appearance. There's an odd—radical, even—oval green highlight floating on the surface of her right eye. In all, the neutral steadiness of her dark gaze couldn't contrast more with the warmth of her passionate, flowery mouth—its glint of teeth, of tongue. I squint into the shadows, but I can't tell what she's thinking. Finally, a distinct bright pink blush fills the girl's cheeks. She is desire and acceptance and fate, rather than comfort or understanding. This is what makes the painting so troubling, yet irresistible and paradoxically consoling to me. I can't look away. Georgia O'Keeffe once said: “Nobody sees a flower, really—it is so small it takes time—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

After such intensity, such clawing at the heart, I puzzle over details: the strangely exotic mosaic of abstractions surrounding this particular girl. Because they are closer to us than the area in focus—which is centered on her mouth—the lion-head finials on the chair-back are a blurry jangle of reflections. The background appears as a very free, somewhat Matisse-like screen, with a calligraphic, decorative, or architectural motif. The artist's signature is a monogram above the hat, integrated into the design.

The young girl,
who
she is—the dead-level particularity of her glance—gathers willfully, unforgettably, out of a ground of indeterminacy and dream, from whose depths she herself and everything around her is composed. Because I have felt such immense longing and seen it reflected in a lover's eyes, I feel it again now in every nerve.

2. Balance

When I do pull away, I refocus on the larger work just to the right,
Woman Holding a Balance.

There's an ethereal simplicity, a radiance surrounding this woman that feels overtly religious. She looks beatific, I think; she looks like purity incarnate. Vermeer is inside his recurring room, his dream, and he approaches the presence of this woman with utter reverence. She stands before a table scattered with pearls and gold coins and chains, delicately holding a balance between right thumb and index finger. She is checking its accuracy by weighing nothing. (Much ink has been spilled on what the balance pans contain. The painting was traditionally called
The Gold Weigher
. But it's clear, now that the work has been thoroughly cleaned, that each pan holds a small highlight of reflection and nothing else.)

Edward Snow concludes his beautiful book,
A Study of Vermeer
, with a discussion of this painting. He obsesses over the contrast between the woman's serene balance and what is depicted in the painting hanging directly behind her. It's an apocalyptic, Bosch-like Last Judgment with a seated Christ raising both arms above a writhing horde of naked sinners. Snow believes the baroque, moralizing Christian values as reflected in the wall painting are directly contradicted by the secular scene before it. He sees this triumph as the essence of Vermeer.

I crane in close to see the Last Judgment. It's a let down, though, for as close as I get, I can hardly make out
anything
in the wall painting behind the woman. I polish my glasses on a shirttail and try again. I can more or less see where Christ is, and a few flame-like shapes of the sinners beneath him, but that's about it. This might be partially due to the lighting in the small temporary space—there's either not enough of it or too much reflection off the glass and/or the painting's glaze. For whatever reason, the painting-within-the-painting is largely illegible, as such details often are in Vermeer's work.