Travels in Vermeer

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Book: Travels in Vermeer Read Online Free PDF
Author: Michael White
or day and a half had gone from being healthy to being dead.”
    It’s difficult to know for certain what to make of that cryptic statement. But hard times were upon the Dutch, at war yet again, and the art market had evaporated in the widespread panic. As a result, Vermeer couldn’t feed his large family—his wife and their eleven children— and when he died, he left them bankrupt. It’s known that he kept The Art of Painting at home to the end, alone among all his works. Then, after the bankruptcy, Catharina faithfully attempted to safeguard the masterpiece from creditors by transferring ownership to her mother. However, it seems to have been sold at auction soon thereafter.
    If The Art of Painting is a high water mark among Vermeer’s interior scenes, View of Delft is anomalous. Without moving from my spot, I pivot left again, toward the View . As the only real landscape, it’s an exception within a uniquely focused career, and absolutely shines in this room.
    The high, swept sky, with its shadowy threat in the first bank of clouds above us and a brilliant whiteness of cirrus beyond, registers distance in brighter and brighter drifts of cloud above the North Sea. This big sky is dully mirrored in the bronze-green waters of the Schie, and it dazzles the eye with passages of distilled brilliance and my mind with memories of such brilliance. I hunch my shoulders; I even squint a little. Although facing a shuttered window in the wall directly across from it, the painting radiates; it is the light-source inside this physical space.
    Beyond the radiance of the composition, I’m struck by the thickness of the paint. The clouds are laid in with the same heavy impasto technique Vermeer used for some of the whitewashed walls in his interiors, and for the face of The Milkmaid . The lead-white pigment of the period was unusually coarse (and prized for its coarseness), its grainy texture gathering points of reflected light. Vermeer also sometimes mixed sand into the paint (especially in the earlier work) to create texture and luminosity. Some highlights—like the bright yellow hue that adorns gables and walls in the townscape—are so built up, they glitter like a papier-mâché school project. The vision is lovingly layered and hewn, and it’s even more startling to us now, accustomed as we are to processed paints and pigments. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time famously and enigmatically includes a passage about a “little patch of yellow wall” somewhere in this painting, like a “priceless specimen of Chinese art,” which is the last thing the writer Bergotte looks at before he dies. No one knows for sure which patch of paint Proust meant.
    And then there’s the lovely, vaguely lonely feel of the town itself. The painting is composed of several bands: sky and city and water. The sky is the largest of these; beneath the sky is the narrow strip of city; then the bronze-green Kolk. And in the left foreground, on our side, there’s part of the riverbank at our feet, with a moored ferry and several people. Two women stand off on their own, talking. They’re wearing peasant dresses, black with white collars. One holds a basket.
    What we see of the town, across the water, is mostly waterfront— the outer walls and gates with rooftops and towers above—and in the center glows one particular sunlit fold of buildings. We’re actually looking across the Schie, straight up the mouth of the main canal that divides, just after the bridge, to become Delft’s principal arteries, the Oude Delft and the Nieuwe Delft. I can make out the bridge, the city wall, two entrances on the southern end—the Rotterdam Gate and the Schiedam Gate—and then, beyond, a slice of the interior: a couple of steeples and roofs, and not much else. The scene is gorgeously, fervently colored—blood-red roofs on the left, deep ochre on the right—passionate,
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