Travels in Vermeer (3 page)

She stands before a still life of bread crusts and basket, pouring a steady trickle of milk from an earthenware pitcher into a bowl—a slip of motion at the heart of so much stillness. Her form is startling, hyper-real: the vivid lemon-yellow tunic balanced against the lapis lazuli depths of her skirts. Likewise, the tight weave of the wicker basket; cool, crisp, linen bonnet; nubby tunic. Stillness. Not emptiness but stillness, a great soul balanced there.

I'm drawn to her broad and ruddy brow—built up laboriously of heavy, individual strokes of impasto that remain unmixed—but also to the wall behind her. It is a coarse, workaday wall, befitting the painting's subject and memorable for its grittiness, its lovingly pockmarked patina. Above and to the left of the maid's face are trompe-l'oeil nails with nail-heads and, most startlingly, the shadows of the nails, fixed in the plaster. The light falls from the left onto the maid's chest, bordering her right side in deep shade. By dramatically brightening the wall to her right, which, in a more realistic painting, would be in shadow, Vermeer defines her by contrast. A thin, white line, outlining her right side and sculpting her almost into relief, heightens this effect. The calculation, the trickery is nearly invisible; the image ravishes. After a few minutes, I move left, sidestepping the steady throng
The Milkmaid
attracts.

The Little Street
is also a hymn to the domestic, a representative view of Delft—a long, slow, cloud-banked afternoon, such as Vermeer must have seen, at any given moment, through his studio window. A couple of women, glimpsed through open doorways, go about their chores; two children crouch beneath a bench outside, utterly absorbed in some game of their own. Between the roofs of the two main houses, at the front of the painting, is a V of skyline, with grayish, thinly painted chimneys receding into the scumbled distance. A few tendrils of ivy cling to the front of the cottage at left, convincing, yet of a weird, almost neon-blue. (I'll discover later that this is a fairly common occurrence in Dutch painting; the loss of the surface yellow glaze turns the natural ultramarine green to blue.)

Some details, like the thicket of chimneys, are quick strokes on the canvas. Others are exquisitely realistic, like the watery striations in the cobbles, the whitewashed brick around each doorway. I love how the whitewash extends only as high as a man could conveniently reach, and the way the shutters on the right-hand house grow more sun-faded as the eye moves from the first to the third floor. Tributaries of cracks in the fascia angle down the grain of the brickwork, roughly patched with mortar. There's something deeply familiar, deeply felt, about this vision of the taken-for-granted, wear-and-tear of time. On the one hand, there's a light touch that makes more recent eras of realism plod by comparison. On the other, the faithfulness of the eye and the brush makes the blurry effects of Impressionism seem a little callow. It is a style as much unconscious as conscious—and blessedly free of sentiment—as if a caul had suddenly lifted, allowing the eye to meet the world.

With some effort, I pull away, and skirt around to the right of
The Milkmaid,
to
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
. It is a later work (c. 1662–1665), though not as late as
The Love Letter
(c. 1667–1670). The differences between
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
and the two earlier works are unsettling. The softly shadowed side of the woman's face is indistinguishable in color from the shadowy contour map that undulates directly behind her; it is of Holland, though I'd only discover this later, in art books. The vision is all softness, tones of sepia and cerulean. In certain passages, like the front and sleeve of the ultramarine blouse, highlights are laved in gold. Along the plaster wall, which glows pale-gold, shadows are tinted blue.

Unlike the gritty backdrop for the woman in
The Milkmaid
— which is as luminous and detailed as possible—there is no sense of perspective supporting this carefully coifed but solitary blue letter-reader. She floats in the currents of her own space, with nothing to fix her among the nebulous hues of the plaster, the umber terra incognita of the map. What we see of her form—her neck, her forearms—is elegantly pale and long, though her body seems to swell at the waist; whether this is due to a pregnancy, or to the belled style of the dress, I can't decide.

I remember Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Moose,” which describes a memory of a childhood voyage, a night-time bus trip. The bus stops because a “grand, otherworldly” moose has appeared in the middle of the moonlit road. Then, taking its time, the moose inspects the bus, and the speaker whispers:

Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

Why do I feel this sweet sensation of joy? I look from one painting to the next: the little street, the milkmaid, and the letter reader. For the moment, I am this tingling at the back of my scalp.

4. The Flash

I walk ahead through late, dark Rembrandt, and then loop back to Vermeer again. I browse through elegant De Hooch—his open doorways, merry companies—then return to Vermeer again. Finally, I move on to the heavily guarded, sea-green room that houses Rembrandt's masterpiece commonly known as
The Night Watch
(actually titled
The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch
). Its size and splendor is a shock. Fourteen feet wide, it seethes with national pride. The captain and his lieutenant are lit at the center with dramatic chiaroscuro, as is a little girl, part mascot, part guardian angel. Behind and around the three, an entire militia prepares for a peacetime parade, though for all the Baroque bravado of musket and lance, they might as well be readying to die for the common good. Here I stop.

I've seen enough, the exit beckons, but something has happened. Instead of leaving, I turn and float lightheaded against the press of the crowd, back through the galleries to the Vermeer room again.

Then I stand before the sunlit street, the milkmaid, and the letter reader. I'm thinking now with my eyes, my skin, I'm drifting sidelong into dream—the paintings meet me there. I feel the trickle of memory in the street's gutter. There is the doe-faced maid at the center of it all, ministering forever. There is the cloud-blue reader, dissolving in the raptness of her attention.

I'm standing well back in the center of the room. People move quietly toward the paintings. Each person whispers, in German or Japanese; some say nothing at all.

Suddenly, I understand: Vermeer's hushed clarity addresses me, is
for
me as I stand here now. What I've been going through, what I've tried to deal with in my divorce, is total loss. I thought I knew about all that when my first wife, Jackie, died of cancer—but this time, I 'd lost faith. It isn't just that I don't believe in love; I'm not sure I believe in anything. But, looking at these radiant canvases— unreachable yet familiar—reminds me. The rapturous inner life of each woman and the infinitesimally detailed and self-contained life of the street are each imagined as an undiscovered heaven on earth. It's as if these visions are here to startle me to my senses by showing me recovered images from a former life.

Now I leave and retrace my steps through the rooms. On the white marble stairway, I reach for the sharp-edged, stainless-steel handrail. A shape flits before me, inside me, in my mind—an abstract shape like a helix, like the arc of a swallow's flight. I reach the landing, and turn.

All this takes place in a moment: one prolonged flash.

When I was ten or eleven, on a cold gray autumn day, my older brother Dan took me outside and unwrapped a foot-long ribbon of magnesium. (Because my father tended to bring his work home with him, our house back then was a wonderland of beakers and Bunsen burners, microscopes, pipettes, and other paraphernalia.) He let me hold it, weightless and malleable in my hands. Then he solemnly went through a vaguely scientific process of sparking a propane torch, fine-tuning its flame—as Dad had taught him— and lighting the coiled magnesium on our gravel drive. It burned spookily, with a godlike, white-blue flame that Dan said we were not supposed to look at. When he threw a cup of water on it, it sputtered noxiously, then leapt up violently, so we flinched and scattered. Soon, though, it petered out, and we were left to marvel at its spiral spine of ash.

The eerie, inexplicable intensity I feel when looking at Vermeer's paintings is like that—that different kind of fire. A certain chain of events has left me open, on a startlingly deep level, to Vermeer's gaze, to his meditation on our place on earth.

There are only thirty-five Vermeers in the world. How many cities house groups of them? Not more than a handful, I'm pretty sure. I could see most of the oeuvre in a matter of months. I'll use every break from school, travel from city to city, museum to museum. And because of the light that Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum has shed on Vermeer, this visit will be the model for the rest.

5. Itinerary

Outside, sitting on a black metal bench with a Vermeer catalog, my Marble notebook and Uniball pen in hand, I come up with an itinerary. It starts here in Amsterdam, and will take a little more than a year.

A
MSTERDAM

(Rijksmuseum)

The Little Street
(c. 1657–1661)

The Milkmaid
(c. 1658–1661)

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
(c. 1662–1665)

The Love Letter
(c. 1667–1670)

T
HE
H
AGUE

(Mauritshuis)

The Girl with a Pearl Earring
(c. 1665–67)

View of Delft
(c. 1660–61)

Diana and Her Companions
(c. 1653–56)

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

(The National Gallery)

Girl with a Red Hat
(c. 1665–1667)

Girl Holding a Flute
(c. 1664–1665)

Woman Holding a Balance
(c. 1662–1665)

A Lady Writing
(c. 1665–1666)

N
EW
Y
ORK

(The Frick Collection)

Officer and Laughing Girl
(c. 1655–1660)

Girl Interrupted in Her Music
(c. 1656–1661)

Mistress and Maid
(c. 1666–1667)

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

A Maid Asleep
(c. 1656–1657)

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
(c. 1664–1665)

Study of a Young Woman
(c. 1665–1674)

Woman with a Lute
(c. 1662–1664)

Allegory of Faith
(c. 1670–1674)

L
ONDON

(The Kenwood House)

The Guitar Player
(c. 1670–1672)

(The Royal Collection)

The Music Lesson
(c. 1662–1664)

(The National Gallery)

A Lady Standing at a Virginal
(c. 1670–1673)

A Lady Seated at a Virginal
(c. 1670–1675)

6. The Toast

Early evening: I clatter up to my hotel and, in the alley, lock my black bike to a handy railing. Inside, my room is fresh and cool because I have left the windows open all day. A relaxed café buzz wafts in, through the billowing curtains, up from the canal-front streets below. I unload my backpack onto my bed. I've stopped at the Aelbert Cuyp street-market on the way home and filled my panniers at the fish-stalls and cheese-stalls. A wedge of smoky Gouda; a round of Leiden peppered with cumin seeds; a whole smoked herring wrapped in butcher-paper; a jar of brine-cured, purplish Calamata olives; two shriveled Italian salamis; a crusty loaf in its brown paper sleeve; a few Sanguineli oranges; a small box of Belgian chocolates wrapped in golden foil. I arrange all this on the tiny, round pedestal table next to the open window. I raise a glass of mineral water to the Amsterdam skyline, and then saw into the hard cheeses and pungent, wild boar salamis as best I can with a sterling butter knife. I'm famished; I tear the rinds with my teeth, can't get enough.

Later, after a hot shower, I wipe a clearing in the mirror and take a long look. I'd like to say I see my father's son, the handsome sailor, hiding beneath this grizzled forehead with eyes askew, this crooked and dented nose, but I don't. It's just a middle-aged guy, a recovering drunk, who looks look pretty tired and old. Still, as if a broken heart were something like a hangover, I try to focus myself. I pick up the bottle of Lexapro, unscrew the cap, and pour the contents into the toilet.

T
HE
H
AGUE AND
D
ELFT

[
June
]

1. The Girl

Another turbulent red-eye flight to Schiphol, and once again, I haven't slept. The countryside steams by in the sun as I roll seaward in a sunflower-yellow local train, past the ungainly windmills, flooded polders, village after village. Past sheep and goats and swans and geese. It's green-gold June. I've been reading travel books in preparation for my return. Watching the vista unspool with its relentless flatness—the view unimpeded in every direction and dwarfed by the towering sky above—I understand why there are four Dutch nouns for
horizon,
although I can't recall them now. A second later, I realize I've missed the tulip season by a couple of weeks. Empty field after empty field files past, precisely measured and orderly.

One month ago my father passed away. Back in Missouri, on his way to church one afternoon, he was T-boned by a young man driving a big F-250. Nothing I could do, the young man said. My father remained in a coma for several days and never regained consciousness. His sons and daughters, all five of us, gathered at his bedside and made a difficult decision on his behalf. Faced with another hard loss without respite, all I can decide to do is press on with Vermeer.

In The Hague Central, I slide the handle out of my bag and wheel outside—past the happy couples checking their iPhones, looking for cabs—without the vaguest notion of where I'm going. I've only bumped along a few blocks, toward what seems the center of things, when I make out a two-story banner, draped down a building just across a square: an immense reproduction of
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
.