Travels in Vermeer Read Online Free

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