Travels in Vermeer Read Free Page B

enlisted. It turned out there were two and only two aspects of the Navy that suited me: drinking and traveling. Because I continued to drink like a sailor after my discharge, I ended up in recovery a few years later. That was almost twenty-five years ago. I’ve yet to find a reason to stop traveling.
    3. Why, Why
    The next morning, I drop in at a MacBike location a block from my hotel, rent a big, black clunker, and head off for the Rijksmuseum. In the Philips Wing, an exhibition of seventeenth-century paintings, “The Masterpieces,” is on temporary display. The rest of the museum is undergoing its long-anticipated renovation, or reincarnation. The show is a best-hits narrative, culminating in Rembrandt’s colossal Night Watch, always the crown jewel here. In seventeen rooms, the show sketches the explosion of secular art: portrait, still life, seascape, genre scene. The twenty Rembrandts, including the great The Jewish Bride, are arrayed in the two galleries toward the end. The latter is a picture of a somewhat older couple (perhaps Isaac and Rebecca), clasping each other solemnly. It’s as arresting for its splendid golden textures and hallowed light, as for its subject; it makes me realize how rare it is to see such a sincere celebration, without a tinge of irony, of older adults in love.
    Along the way, there are a couple of smaller rooms devoted to groups of paintings by Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer. Because there are so many Rembrandts to see, I decide to give the Vermeer room only a minute or two. I stop and gaze down the length of the space; three works by the Delft master hang on the far wall. (A fourth appears with related genre works—busy group scenes—on the right-hand wall.) The Vermeers are unexpectedly small, but the force of the spell they cast is so eerily powerful that it’s difficult to move, to breathe.
    So I stop, I look around. The walls are cream-colored floral damask; the floor is parquet, with a centered, rectangular, slate blue rug. Behind me: Gabriel Metsu’s frankly disturbing yet sympathetic The Sick Child . I take a step or two toward the small Vermeer on the wall to my right: it’s called The Love Letter . Revealed through a dark doorway is a complicated scene. A well-dressed lady, holding a lute (I think), receives, over her shoulder, the eponymous letter from her maid. The room they are in is opulent, filled with bourgeois clutter (a laundry basket, a broom, a crumpled sheet of music). There’s a sense of withheld meaning in this painting—withheld from me— and it doesn’t attract me.
    I move ahead to the Vermeers on the far wall. The Milkmaid is in the center. On the left is a cityscape, The Little Street. On the right is the pensive Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. But it is The Milkmaid that stuns from a distance, drawing my eyes magnetically to the lowered eyes of the woman, her shadow incised against the luminous whitewash. I feel a shiver all the way up and down my spine.
    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