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There’s something bewitching about a glimpse of near-tranquillity, a feathery ripple of emotion or a chuckle in a dark room. Vermeer died young, broken by catastrophe on an enormous scale. Yet we revere him now for the way he savoured instants that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, the skill with which he chronicled flickers of deep but inconspicuous feeling.
For the first exhibition in its freshly refurbished home, the Frick has assembled a trio of blazing, murmuring Vermeers, composed of the simplest ingredients: a pair of women, a pen, a table, a sheet of paper, a ray of light. Each of these scenes of letters being written or delivered provides a tantalising peek into an inner life. We don’t know who is using what words to communicate what thoughts, but we can easily imagine how envious the painter must have been of the serenity he depicted. His own home was deluged with children — 11 of them — and his wife Catharina was surely too busy rousting, feeding, bathing and herding them to enjoy much contemplative hush.
The three paintings are deceptively alike. A splendidly clad woman sits, a maid dressed in practical brown stands, and a letter passes between them, or is about to, on its way to or from the outside world. These works give off the poetic emanations of life’s ordinary prose, the grandeur of stilled actions, half thoughts and interrupted daydreams. The act of writing takes on a numinous halo; even a few seconds of nothing much seem saturated with significance. When you’ve come in off the boiling, roiling, stinking Manhattan streets, these immaculate domestic vignettes, hanging in the Frick’s sort-of-domestic setting, offer an interval of private grace.
In the most characteristic of the three, “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid” (on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), an elegant, bejewelled lady in a lace-trimmed bonnet and a bodice of pale-gold silk bends over her correspondence. She is focused on the task, her concentration heightened by the sunshine that spills through stained glass, spotlighting the hand that draws the quill across the gleaming page.
The other character has something else on her mind. She turns towards the window, watching out of the corner of her eye, her lips parted in mute curiosity. The writer’s absorption and the attendant’s distraction are both encapsulated in the stick of sealing wax that’s tumbled to the floor, a lone flourish of messiness that neither of them notices.
While the maid looks out, we look in, observing from our position on this side of a curtain that now reads as a muted brown but that in Vermeer’s time shone a bright shade of green. The drape pulls back to reveal a tableau that casts viewers as voyeurs — or detectives. We can’t tell what kind of letter the woman is writing (to a shopkeeper? a lover? a family member far away?), what event in the street has caught her maid’s attention, or what hidden meaning lies in the painting on the wall depicting baby Moses being snatched from the Nile. Vermeer doles out information in drops of mystery.
The Frick’s larger “Mistress and Maid” treats the same subject in a contrasting manner. The action glows against a background so dark that it verges on the crypt-like. Vermeer first adorned the wall with a tapestry and then painted over it to keep attention on the human drama. There’s no visible window, yet light shoots in from the left, glinting off the protagonist’s globular earring and the pearls around her neck.
You can see a trace of Caravaggio in the battle between sunshine and shadow and in the theatrical composition that pushes the figures forward into the viewers’ space. And yet there’s no violence or strain, no bolt of revelation, just a polite encounter across class lines. A maid opens her mouth to speak and passes the letter to her employer, who’s sumptuously dressed in yellow and ermine. The wealthy woman has been writing, but she lays down her pen and glances up, fingers thoughtfully grazing her chin. Perhaps her life is about to change, or maybe the moment will be immediately forgotten. What remains is the exquisiteness of not knowing.
In the “The Love Letter”, which comes from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, we have been exiled from the room entirely. By accident or in secret, we peer through a darkened anteroom, spying on an intimate exchange. The fur-trimmed yellow outfit is familiar and maybe we’ve seen the model before, too, but now she’s playing the cittern — or was, until her maid popped in with a note. Vermeer charges the scene with urgency and hope. The servant reassures the mistress with a soothing smile. A fair-weather seascape on the wall signals smooth sailing ahead.
That was wishful thinking on Vermeer’s part. In 1672, two years after he painted “The Love Letter”, harsher news arrived in the form of a French invasion of the Netherlands. Suddenly unable to sell his own paintings, saddled with those of other artists that he had on consignment, and burdened with a gaggle of children, he fell apart. “He lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead,” his widow recounted. He was 43 years old.
Catharina soldiered on by trading art for bread. “The Love Letter” was one of two paintings she handed over to a local baker, hoping to redeem them later. She never did. And so this gently optimistic interior became a form of sustenance in a war zone, the instrument of physical as well as spiritual nourishment. Its survival seems like a miracle, but then man-made beauty, even the quiet kind, turns out to be a sturdy shield against desperation.
To August 31, frick.org
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