Travels in Vermeer (17 page)

I can say she was exactly one inch shorter than I because of our first kiss, which took place on her darkened porch, where dead June bugs lay on their backs along the edges and beneath the swing, too many to ever sweep away. It was ten p.m.; it was time for me to go. “Well,” she said, and then I rose, and she rose too, and immediately took me by the elbows. I didn't let on I'd never kissed anyone before, had never even been that close to a girl before. We were standing almost nose to nose, after weeks of maintaining a calculated distance, after weeks when the only touch allowed was an incidental brush of wrist or shoulder, after weeks when my entire nervous system, root and capillary, ached with an almost painful electromagnetic current.

She stood on tiptoe, and I leaned this way, and she leaned that way and lifted her mouth to mine, and then I kissed her, tasted her lip-gloss and grape soda, flickering tip of her tongue, her half-closed, spangled irises a fraction of an inch from mine. All this while, she seemed to keep shifting maddeningly back and forth in my arms, like weather I thought, like glimpses of some fabulous landscape I was traveling through that kept unfolding at every turn. That's when I learned what heaven is: proximity.

10. Alice

It's Sunday, my last day in London. On the enormous blackand-white marble portico in front of the National Gallery, I'm leaning—palms splayed against the iron railing, set between Corinthian columns—into the view, the moment. It would be a perfect smoke break if I still smoked, like the black-haired kid in his Levi jacket a couple of columns away from me. Ashen rainclouds hover over London. Nelson's Column presides above Trafalgar Square, with four colossal brass lions at the base of each corner, and a fountain on each side of it with lyrically plumbed dolphins, mermaids, and tritons. The double-deckers queue and pull over, colors like cigarette embers. On my left, the high plinth of St. Martin-inthe-Fields. The white facades, gilt lettering of Canada House, South Africa House flank the square.

“Pardon me, sir, no smoking on the portico,” a guard who has come out from inside says to the youth. She gleams in her slim navy suit; she seems Indian or Pakistani. She suggests he go down to the square.

“Okay, sorry,” he says, and heads for the steps. “Sorry.”

I watch her stride elegantly back across the checkerboard mosaic floor of the portico—across the seven rows of black marble squares, laid on a bias, to the front door. I'm reminded of something in
Alice in Wonderland
, of how Alice finds her way across the enormous chessboard, crossing from square to square—though she herself does not always seem to be aware of it—because of the borders of asterisks, three staggered rows that the eye leaps over before resuming reading:

* * * *

* * *

* * * *

When Sophia sees the asterisks, she says, “
Look
—we're crossing over!” wriggling in my lap. There's a brief, held-breath sensation of flight. And then the story takes off again.

The point of the chess game was to create what Carroll called “a dream of a pawn's-eye view of a looking-glass game of chess.” I'm thinking of Vermeer like that. What he paints is a pawn's eye view of love—as far as love can even be seen, as far as love can ever be known by chalk line, lens, and north light slanting into a room.

11. The Sphinx

Inside the National Gallery, I climb the stairs—two flights, two touches of the brass rail at my right hand—then turn left at the top. I have all afternoon. I pass through several long, cool galleries, searching for Room 16—which, according to my museum map, is where I'll find the two Vermeers that have always seemed to belong here, at the end of my travels. I look for the room number where I am: it's 23.

Directly in front of me is Rembrandt's rough-hewn, ravishing
Woman Bathing in a Stream
(1654) referencing Susanna and her story, and then his 1669
Self Portrait at the Age of 63
, one of the last of the line, the pursed, collapsed intelligence gathered, as usual, by focused chiaroscuro about the sagging and spectral eyes. On the opposite wall is Carel Fabritius' powerful self-portrait entitled
Young Man in a Fur Cap,
from 1654, the year he died. The steel breastplate he's wearing, with its heavy impasto sun-glint, is exactly the type of archaic embellishment Rembrandt often added. It reminds me also of the outlandish turban in
Girl with a Pearl Earring
. Something that all three painters share is a devastating frankness, a kind of naturalism that is, interestingly, complemented by such exotic costumes.

There could have been no Vermeer without his mentor, Fabritius. I pull my notebook out of my backpack, jot down the titles, a bit of description about each (“level gaze,” “luminosity” and so forth), and then head onward.

The long galleries end; the more intimate scale of each room ahead signals to me that I'm close to where Vermeer will be. An odd apparatus dominates the center of Room 17, which is filled with miniatures by Leiden painters including Gerrit Dou and Rolandt Savery. This cumbersome apparatus is Samuel Van Hoogstraten's perfectly preserved “peepshow.” It's the only survivor among many, a big wooden perspective box (c. 1655–60) with a decorated exterior, on a wooden pedestal. One side is open to admit light; there's an aperture to “peep” through on each of the narrower ends.

Leaning down and peering inside is unsettling, as the complete interior of a Dutch house unfolds in anamorphic perspective, with all sorts of trompe-l'oeil doorways, paintings-within-the-paintings, mirrors, even a trusty black-and-white dog sitting in the center of the black-and-white floor. Hoogstraten's signature is found in the deliciously clever form of a self-addressed letter lying casually on the seat of a chair. As a whole, the box is simply an illusionist masterpiece, its hues and textures as saturated and intense and magical as a Vermeer.

Now I see how much of what we believe about Vermeer—“The Sphinx of Delft,” as the nineteenth century French critic Thoré-Bürger named him, casting him as an enigmatic genius—is wrong. Vermeer was never alone. The vocabulary that we associate with him—the geometrical patterns of the tiled floors, the straight-backed, leather-upholstered chairs, the treatment of glass, even the meticulously measured rake of light though space—is here, too, in this box, as clearly as in Vermeer's paintings. Suddenly I know how Alice must have felt—after finding the correct miniature door for her miniature key—on peering through the tunnel “not much larger than a rat-hole” into the “loveliest garden you ever saw.”

I straighten up, as dizzy as seventeenth-century viewers must have felt when peering for the first time into these depths. I feel an instinct to write something, and unfold my notebook on the top of the priceless cabinet unthinkingly, but a guard appears out of nowhere to say, “It's not a desk, sir.”

Yes. I'm sorry.
“I'm sorry.”

12. A Lady Standing at a Virginal

Room 16 is intimate, the size of my living room, and exquisitely curated, with the two Vermeers on the right as I go in. A guard is posted in a chair in the doorway. There's a wooden settee in the center of the room—the kind that flexes comfortably in the middle—still close enough to view the Vermeers quite well.

They are arranged on a wall, alternating with paintings of church interiors by Dutch architectural painters, two by Pieter Saanredam and a third by Emanuel de Witte. It seems a little jarring at first to have the Vermeer women framed by paintings of churches. A spiritual statement of some sort? An homage to the homeland? I realize a couple of things, though. There's more than a little common ground between Vermeer and the architectural tradition, with its quasi-scientific study of light, its rigorous design. I decide I like seeing Vermeer's whitewashed walls beside Saanredam's ascetic Calvinist spaces.

On the other three walls are Dutch genre paintings—including a bawdy drinking scene by Gabriel Metsu, entitled
Two Men with a Sleeping Woman
(c. 1655–69) and Pieter De Hooch's sunny masterpiece
The Courtyard of a House In Delft
(1658).

Now it's pretty clear to me why the curator has hung these particular paintings—these genre scenes, as well as the church interiors—in support of
A Lady Standing at a Virginal
and
A Lady Seated at a Virginal
. It's because they show us the context, the culture—both sacred and profane—that produced Vermeer.

One question that lingers over Vermeer's two ladies is whether or not they were intended as pendants. Pendants would typically be a married couple, but elaborations on a subject, as these ladies appear to be, were also a popular type of pendant. Both paintings are studies of a woman staring provocatively into the viewer's eyes and posed with an instrument—and it's the same instrument and the same room, and the paintings themselves are almost exactly the same size. Whether they were conceived as pendants or not, it was only in 1910 that they were permanently reunited here, and have since set up shop as a pair.

I take off my green wool sweater, wrap the sleeves around my waist and tie them there. I slide my backpack under the bench—the guard watches but doesn't object—and move to about eight feet in front of
A Lady Standing at a Virginal
. I check my watch. I stare for about twenty minutes, then retrieve my notebook, and try to record my thoughts.

More than any other Vermeer, I feel, this one memorializes. A tall, young woman, dressed very formally, stands with stiff spine, hands disappearing mysteriously into the recess of the keyboard on the right. Her benign, familiar smile is tinged with a greenish shadow. The eye tracks into the center from an extraordinarily luminous casement. The painting is evenly lit, pale gold, subdued, except for the lavish brilliance in this window, whose leading is delicate, formal, simple. There is no drama in this window, as in the windows of most Vermeers—as in the dingy, workaday window in
The Milkmaid,
for instance, or the crisp, abstract mosaic of the window in
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.
The light falls on the woman's face, but this time, we're not rewarded with an angelic vision, as we are in
The Milkmaid
, but with what seems a deliberately darkened face. This puzzles me, and I want to linger, but my eye is drawn to the back wall of the room, where three paintings are displayed in close succession.

First, there's an extraordinarily ornate gilt frame containing a pastoral landscape. I note the rapid, abstract gold-on-gold brushwork of the frame, which lends an illusion of fine detail. Then, in the center of the wall, above the woman's head, hangs a considerably larger painting of Cupid in an ebony frame. Finally, another landscape painting adorns the underside of the keyboard's lid; such decoration was common. This painting faces from the right of the room back toward the woman and the window. In a clever twist of scholarship, Gregor Weber has shown that the two landscape paintings are in reality versions of the same actual painting,
Mountain Landscape with Travelers
, by the Delft painter Pieter Groenewegen. Though it's common for maps and paintings to reappear in different paintings, to include the same painting-within-a-painting
twice
in this particular composition seems remarkable to me.

The vanishing point, the pinprick in
A Lady Standing at a Virginal
is centered on her heart. There's an eerie symmetry to the room—the lower casement and the instrument's painted landscape facing each other directly, through the young woman's torso. She stands stock-still at the center of an extraordinarily well-defined space. Nothing is concealed; nothing is left to chance.

My eye moves on to the plump, golden Cupid on the back wall. This is the third appearance of Cesar van Everdingen's Cupid— completing the series begun with
A Maid Asleep,
where only the left foot is visible, and continuing with
Girl Interrupted in Her Music.
It's as if it were planned, this gradual revelation. But how could Vermeer have foreseen what would come?

In any case, this Cupid takes the place that another figure might have taken in a painting like
Officer and Laughing Girl.
He stands slightly to the lady's right—his bow, as he leans against it, planted firmly as if on the top of her head. He becomes her, she becomes him, and the message, the romantic theme, isn't lost on me.

And so she looks out at me through the picture's plane—near the end of the glances, the series of Cupids, near the end of my journey through Vermeer. I've read that the unusual greenish hue of her shadowed face is due to the Italian Renaissance practice of using a green underpainting to neutralize the pink skin tones on the surface. She's a little matronly, with a prominent nose—and if her gaze is inviting at all, it's hard to tell, because her face is small and doll-like. The greenish shadow is very noticeable; it's difficult to find her appealing, at least in any conventional way.

Still, the painting insists on presenting the lady as a beauty, an object of desire. Many details of the painting sing praises to her— the lascivious little cupid speaking openly (at last) on her behalf; her elaborate formal hairdo, with beaded chignon and delicate ringlets hanging across her forehead; and the elaborate formal silk gown with scarlet bows tied in front of her bodice. Also, her elegant
tabbaard
would seem to celebrate marriage. Her eyes are matter-offact, expectant and unsurprised by my presence in the room. She's waiting calmly for me to take my seat—on the inviting expanse of the cerulean velvet cushion on the chair, while the brass rivets gleam along the seatback, precious as pearls. We're used to each other by now, in the assumed intimacy the painting projects, and she doesn't shock, or draw me toward some agonizing and self-aware precipice.

This painting has a completely different kind of intensity from that of
The Milkmaid
or
Woman Holding a Balance.
Here, the red ribbons leap as much from the contrast with the coolness of her blue bodice and shadowed face, from the scarcity of warmth, as from any quality of their own. The wall glows with a pristine, otherworldly evenness. I sit on the bench; I move in to look for half-hour intervals. Hard to believe such softness of line, such spectral shapes dissolving in the gaze.