Take Five: Vermeer — Why I Adore Him

by Mary McHugh

Emily Mitchell has written a beautiful critique of the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of the Delft painters and Vermeer, and I wanted to write a complementary column on my own personal feelings about Vermeer.

To put it simply, I adore him. He is my favorite painter of them all. Part of his appeal is the size of his paintings. They are small and exquisite, rather than huge and overwhelming, like Rembrandt’s paintings. I love Rembrandt, but I don’t get lost in his paintings the way I do the Vermeers. There is something so intimate and personal about his work, and the faces of his subjects are so expressive that I can easily pretend I know what they are saying to each other.

I saw the exhibit at the Met this week, and, while I welcomed the chance to see so many Vermeers at once, my favorite place to see this painter is at the Frick Museum at 70th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York.

The Frick is a little gem of a museum, once the home of Henry Clay Frick, which still retains its warmth and intimacy in spite of the magnificent furniture, rugs, sculpture, and paintings. I love the small courtyard in the center of the house, where you can sit on marble benches around the lily pond, listening to taped recordings of Mr. Frick’s favorite music and dream about living there in the early part of the 20th century.

The Frick has three Vermeers: Officer and Laughing Girl; “Mistress and Maid,” and “Girl Interrupted at her Music.” I am drawn into these paintings, part of the small, intimate scenes, imagining what these people are saying to each other, making up stories about their lives, longing to reach out and touch the soft ermine on the lady in yellow, the leaded glass in the windows, the diamond-patterned tile on the floor.

Vermeer’s paintings almost always focus on a woman. The light falls on her face as she talks to a lover or her maid, plays the virginal or pours milk from a pitcher. Often she wears pearls, as part of her coiffure or as earrings. Each Vermeer has its secrets, its hidden story, its symbols and wonders. The stories I make up about these paintings are influenced by a marvelous novel called “The Girl in the Pearl Earring,” by Tracy Chevalier. In that book, the little maid is often a model for Vermeer and we see the master painter through her eyes.

The lady with the pearls entwined in her hair, wearing a pale yellow velvet jacket trimmed with the softest of ermine, appears in several of Vermeer’s paintings and I made up a whole short story about her in my mind. She is a young married woman in her early thirties, the wife of a prosperous merchant, trained to entertain her husband’s clients and run the household to his liking. Blond and pretty, she has grown bored with her husband and is restless with her housewifely duties. She tells her husband she wishes to learn to play the lute and arranges for private lessons with the young and handsome musician who taught her daughters to play. Soon she looks forward to his visits and dresses carefully before each lesson. We see her putting on her pearl necklace in “The Woman With the Pearl Necklace,” the light from the leaded glass window illuminating her face, red ribbons tucked into her hair, the soft yellow of her top casting a glow on her fair skin.

In “Woman With a Lute,” we see her eagerly awaiting her teacher, seated at a table, looking out the window in anticipation of his visit. She is animated, intense, happy, as she waits for him. We have no painting of her with this young man, but I imagine him standing behind her, showing her how to hold the lute, how to place her fingers on the strings. He is close enough to breathe in the scent of her hair and she can feel his warmth next to her body. She turns to him. He leans down and kisses her. Then, frightened by the difference in their social status, he leaves.

The next painting, “A Lady Writing,” shows our naughty housewife looking out at us, a sensual half-smile on her lips, still in the yellow gown, the pearls glistening in her ears. She is writing a letter, obviously to this young man. “I felt our last lesson was incomplete,” she writes, smiling again. “I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday afternoon so that I might learn the rest of the song.”

She calls in her little maid (I imagine she is the one in the book, The Girl in the Pearl Earring,” who is far smarter than her station in life would suggest) and hands her the letter in the painting, “Mistress and Maid.” This painting is my favorite and it is hanging in my room so I can see it every morning when I awake. The lady has her hand on her chin, and I imagine her thinking as she tells the maid where to take the letter, “Should I be doing this? Will he be afraid to come again? Maybe I shouldn’t send it.” But she does, and the reply to her note arrives that very day. We see her in “The Love Letter,” holding the message her maid has just brought her. She is seated, holding the lute on her lap, still wearing her yellow outfit, pearls in her ears. But her expression is anxious. She is not sure what she has started and whether she is embarking on something that will risk her marriage and comfortable life with her boring husband. What will she do?

The last painting of the lady in yellow is called “The Guitar Player.” She is looking up at someone not shown in the painting, with a smile that could only be for her young lover, her cheeks pink with the anticipation of what will happen next. And we know, watching her, that he will make love to her that very afternoon and will make her happy until she is bored with him and decides to learn to play the virginal with another musician, or perhaps to paint watercolors with a young artist at the academy.

You can see that I am caught up in Vermeer’s paintings as if they were a movie -- or at least a Lifetime Movie of the Week -- and it is only this painter who affects me this way.

If I haven’t lost you, gentle reader, please write and tell me if Vermeer has a similar effect on you or if I am dotty at last. I depend on you to set me straight.

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