Read Online Travels in Vermeer by Michael White - Free Book Online Page B

forwardness is projected there, surrounded by curious highlights. On each side, for instance, she’s wearing enormous, hollow, glass-pearl earrings, like the exquisite, almost invisible earring in The Girl with a Pearl Earring . The shape is entirely implied by the vaguely comma-shaped touch of white lead that reads as reflection and contour. The ornament, the romance is nearly ghost or memory.
    Beneath the chin—precisely defined along the right-hand, illumined edge, but shadow-smudged on the left—she’s wearing a translucent lace scarf, nothing more than an incandescent, smoke-like swirl. Toward the left, as the scarf slips into shadow, it disappears, except for a few patches of optically-blurred white light.
    The girl’s lush mouth is perhaps even more provocative than the mouth of The Girl with a Pearl Earring , but her nose complicates things. She has been called “somewhat androgynous” by Walter Liedtke (a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and that certainly applies to her rather small eyes and long Dutch nose, which is straight-bridged, with slightly large nostrils. It’s at odds with her delicate, yet arrestingly sensuous lips. Her mouth and nose are linked by a strikingly defined, sunlit cleft on the upper lip, itself part of her idiosyncratic look. Because of all these complications, it might be difficult for me to call the girl pretty, exactly, but neither does this diminish her. And I’m not off the hook. Her eyes bore into me, a moment’s dead level appraisal from arm’s length, over her right shoulder—just as the Mauritshuis girl glances from across her own left shoulder. The scale of both paintings puts me within inches of a face, a gaze, which sees through me completely.
    But the shadowed gaze of this tiny girl gives nothing up—unlike the other’s eyes, which give away all. The upper two-thirds of her face dissolves, the right ear little more than a beige semi-circle. She’s wearing no makeup to bring out her eyes; and her forehead, with no visible brows or lashes, has a smooth, masklike appearance. There’s an odd—radical, even—oval green highlight floating on the surface of her right eye. In all, the neutral steadiness of her dark gaze couldn’t contrast more with the warmth of her passionate, flowery mouth—its glint of teeth, of tongue. I squint into the shadows, but I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Finally, a distinct bright pink blush fills the girl’s cheeks. She is desire and acceptance and fate, rather than comfort or understanding. This is what makes the painting so troubling, yet irresistible and paradoxically consoling to me. I can’t look away. Georgia O’Keeffe once said: “Nobody sees a flower, really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
    After such intensity, such clawing at the heart, I puzzle over details: the strangely exotic mosaic of abstractions surrounding this particular girl. Because they are closer to us than the area in focus—which is centered on her mouth—the lion-head finials on the chair-back are a blurry jangle of reflections. The background appears as a very free, somewhat Matisse-like screen, with a calligraphic, decorative, or architectural motif. The artist’s signature is a monogram above the hat, integrated into the design.
    The young girl, who she is—the dead-level particularity of her glance—gathers willfully, unforgettably, out of a ground of indeterminacy and dream, from whose depths she herself and everything around her is composed. Because I have felt such immense longing and seen it reflected in a lover’s eyes, I feel it again now in every nerve.
    2. Balance
    When I do pull away, I refocus on the larger work just to the right, Woman Holding a Balance.
    There’s an ethereal simplicity, a radiance surrounding this woman that