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Shop, and Adriaen van Ostade’s The Cottage Dooryard . Vermeer comes last, in this lineage, like an exclamation mark.
    But immediately on entering the museum from the ground-floor Constitution Avenue entrance, I come to a small placard signpost of Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat and the words “Dutch Painting” in red. An arrow points into the sculpture gallery. The Dutch suite is on the second floor, which is the main floor, but it turns out, due to a special exhibition, a small sampling of the Dutch and Flemish paintings, including the Vermeers, is now on temporary display here.
    A moment later, I once again feel the shock of stepping into a room lit by Vermeers. From left to right are Girl with a Red Hat, Woman Holding a Balance, and Woman with a Flute . The small size of these paintings is startling. Red Hat, painted on a wooden panel, like the similar Flute, is only about nine by seven inches. Woman Holding a Balance is one of the many Vermeers that seem much bigger than they really are. But it’s about twice the size of the two tiny paintings on each side of it. These three hang crowded together in a tiny room, with a handful of other tiny Golden Age works, including Jan Philips Van Thielsen’s astonishing Rose and Tulip in a Glass Vase, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s River Landscape . The fourth Vermeer, a larger, opulent canvas called A Woman Writing hangs just around a corner, in the next room.
    One advantage of the temporary grouping is that the room is absolutely quiet and intimate; I feel alone with the paintings, as if under glass. I stare and stare. Because Woman Holding a Balance is a masterpiece, because I want to start with something less majestic and work up, I ignore it at first. I fold my corduroy jacket over my arm, put on my reading glasses, and focus on Girl with a Red Hat .
    The pull of the girl’s feverish, apparitional glance seems out of proportion to its tiny size, its colors, anything definable. I’d begun to feel comfortable in Vermeer’s room, the corner with cool light falling from left to right, its lovely girl, its measured quietness. But none of that holds true here, in this very different scene, and I don’t know why. The immediate connection is The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the other passionately confrontational glance. And in fact these works, along with the Girl with a Flute and the Study of a Young Woman, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have much in common. They are sometimes considered “tronies,” a Dutch genre that art critic Alejandro Vergara defines as “paintings of busts or heads, generally wearing hats or exotic clothes and depicting anonymous or fictive characters.” Tronies weren’t considered portraits—or even finished paintings—but demonstrations of skill for the open market.
    Two or three times, then, Vermeer’s magic wand was left on the shelf. Which is to say the gaze—the exquisitely calibrated practice of the studio, finely tuned as it was to strip the veil from the appearances of things—was left on the shelf in favor of a radically different method. And we are the unexpected subject— we, rather than the enchanted room, are what is seen into. The barriers the paintings erect are turned inside out, and figures like this fiery woman reach out to us passionately across the fourth wall and into our own dreams.
    I’m standing before Red Hat, jotting my impressions in my Marble notebook. What I see is focused centrally, the red hat a curved swathe of lacerating, neon red that, on closer inspection, turns out to be composed of several graduated tints, turning at the edges to feathery brush-flecks. The girl’s cloak is a sumptuous ultramarine, with patterns of white and yellow. The center of the painting is not her dark eyes—that seem actually to recede beneath the shadow of the hat—but her remarkably lush, full-lit, and full-lipped mouth. All her