Travels in Vermeer (11 page)

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 should 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.

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.