Travels in Vermeer Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 .
    Night after night in my armchair, with art books or Vermeer studies open in my lap, I had looked at her face, the color plates cool beneath my fingertips. How odd it is to suddenly see her looming as big as a cloud above the treetops, the face I had dreamed of, that had lingered in my mind for weeks, like the Cheshire Cat. My path couldn’t have been more direct, over the ocean and through the streets, and suddenly here I am. I’m raw, as expectant as a pilgrim.
    The Mauritshuis (the Dutch Royal Gallery) houses two of Vermeer’s masterpieces, The Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, as well as an example of his juvenilia, the Italianate Diana and Her Companions . Much to my delight, it happens that one other masterpiece, not on my itinerary, is on loan from Vienna for one more day: his great studio scene, The Art of Painting.
    I’m on my way to see Vermeer, floating up the red-carpeted stairs, in this high-ceilinged palace. Just before entering the Vermeer room, something catches my eye, just to the left of the oak doorframe. It’s Carel Fabritius’s trompe-l’oeil miniature, The Goldfinch, which I recognize from my reading (and which has not yet been made world-famous by Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name). It’s a painting of a domesticated goldfinch on an elaborate perch attached to a whitewashed wall, and the contrast between the off-center, startlingly realized bird and the softly glowing wall behind is striking. Fabritius was Rembrandt’s student, and was later Vermeer’s friend and/or mentor in Delft. Almost all of Fabritius’s paintings were lost in the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, when a gunpowder explosion leveled much of the city. But The Goldfinch, especially—with its naturalism, cool sunlight, white backdrop, grittiness and ordinariness—seems essential to Vermeer. It’s a prelude, a source for the poetry of Vermeer’s solitary women.
    Going into the room, the walls are a muted and patterned green—the light, which comes from the right as you walk in, is shuttered, the effect subaqueous. There’s one painting on each wall. Vermeer’s great landscape, View of Delft, is alone on the left wall, as luminous as a torch. But I also feel a breeze, a shiver on my back as I enter, causing me to turn to face The Girl with a Pearl Earring, to the right of the doorway. I look at her across my left shoulder. She is looking me dead in the eye across her own left shoulder. She is, if any painting ever can be, a breathtaking encounter.
    Love: How could I have forgotten that feeling? The instantaneous, passionate gaze that comprehends me, beyond accusation or forgiveness. The