Jan Vermeer, The Love Letter, 1666, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  17” x 15”.

Here’s some Renaissance lute music to accompany this painting.

We’re snooping again.  We’ve walked in the house, where perhaps we shouldn’t be, and are looking through a doorway, at a young woman and her maid.  They would not be happy to see us.  Someone has pulled aside the curtain that protects the privacy of this brightly lit room.  We look through the frame within a frame over the tiled floor – the tiles laid to draw us across the floor – to the back of the room.  The action in this picture is in the background, not the foreground or the middle as is typical in a painting.  So skillful is the construction that after a minute we feel we’re standing next to the women.  Clever, this Vermeer.

The maid has just brought in a letter. The letter’s sudden arrival has caught the two unprepared.  A laundry basket, a broom, and the slippers are dropped in the entry. Although the letter isn’t opened yet, we’ll guess it’s a love letter.  Why else the grin on the maid’s face and the questioning, slightly alarmed look on the lady’s face? 

She’s been playing the lute, popular in the 17^th century, and an instrument a well brought up young lady might learn to play, much as 150 years later Elizabeth Bennett and her future sister in law learned to play the piano.  The lute is the instrument of love.  Vermeer’s contemporaries – Frans Hals for one – painted lute players in bars and brothels.  In Dutch, the word for lute was also slang for vagina.  (Angels could play heavenly music on a lute, but I think we can safely dismiss any idea that we’re dealing with angels here.)

Maids, in literature, art and the popular imagination, were sexually available, served as go betweens, comic figures, a fifth column with regard to the household walls, and were easily corruptible.  Being typically illiterate, they made good mail carriers.  We can imagine a young bourgeois writing his love letter and entrusting it to an illiterate servant who only moments ago put it into the hands of this maid.

The lady wears a yellow dress:  here we can associate yellow with happiness.  A pearl necklace, jewels in her earrings and more jewels in her hair cap confirm she’s dressed up for visitors and from a wealthy family.  The slippers lying on the floor and the stormy scene in the picture above the pair’s heads may also be suggestive:  the hastily discarded slippers suggest illicit love and the storm of a tempestuous affair or an angry father.  In Dutch slang of the period living together was called “living over the broom.”

Preachers and moralists in 17^th century Holland told their countrymen and women that women’s virtue and purity were a foundation of the republic.  If other women were like these two, the state tottered.

We can speculate for hours about what’s in the letter.  Perhaps a proposal for an assignation, or a thank you for a wonderful evening?  A request for permission to talk her father?  Or, maybe worse, termination of an already well advanced relationship?

Let’s move on.  I can’t imagine Frans Hals painting in the same style.  (See previous post).  He’d never have the patience to paint the clothes draped over the chair (lower right), the sheet music tossed on the seat, or the designs on the fabric, and so on.  Vermeer painted details with care and affection, with the same attention he expended on his models’ moods and expressions.  The brush strokes are not visible, or hardly visible, while Hals’ strokes are easy to see, even in a web-reproduction.

Vermeer painted with great confidence.  The wall behind the women is full of interest:  the paintings, the tapestry or wood work on the wall, the fireplace and carving on lintel, but we hardly notice them and are not distracted from the story about to unfold. 

I’m left with my curiosity:  I want to know what’s going to happen.

What I See When I Look

Frans Hals, Married Couple in a Garden: Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. 1622, Rijksmuseum

I will write a few posts about pictures I enjoyed during our recent trip to Europe.

What better way to remember your wedding than to have a picture of it?  In Haarlem in the early 17^th century, a painting was the only picture available.  If you were lucky, and Frans Hals was a friend, your wedding portrait would survive 400 years and thousands would stand before the portrait every week and remember your wedding.

Isaac (1586 – 1642) was a wealthy grain merchant, diplomat and author from Haarlem, now a short train ride from Amsterdam.  As was usual among his fellow Dutch merchants, his business was the commodity trade with the Baltic countries, especially, for Isaac, Russia and Sweden.  Though he might have taken a flutter from time to time on the risky colonial trade with the East and West Indies, timber, grain and such were the cash flow. 

Isaac had spent the better part of the last 20 years in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.  He’s published up-to-date information about the country and its troubled politics.  He’s a leading merchant, active in politics. 

Beatrix was born in 1592 and died in 1639. 

The happy, relaxed couple sits in a garden; I can’t help smiling when I look at them.  The 30 year old bride maybe about to giggle; no bride could be more pleased with herself.  And well she might be!   The average age of marriage in Amsterdam in the early 17^th c. was 20 to 24.  Her brothers have despaired of their 30 year old sister being anything but an old maid – they don’t want to support her.  But look! she has landed one of the most eligible bachelors in Haarlem.  Also, check out that ring he bought her!  Beatrix makes sure you won’t miss it. *

Hals has placed the couple in a garden.  The couple sits close together, as intimate as their voluminous formal dress will allow. He seems to love his wife; his left arm must be around her waist.   A thistle grows at Isaac’s feet, a symbol of male fertility; ivy grows around them, a symbol of enduring love.  Both plants, once established, are hard to uproot.  To their left is a pleasure garden, and in it a statue of a Greek goddess, two couples, and a pair of peacocks.

I believe they sit under an oak tree, which seems to be a symbol of just about anything, but endurance and strength are found in both Roman and Celtic traditions.

Contemporaries labeled Hals’ technique a “rough style.”  He painted with broad, rushed strokes.  The strokes are clearly visible.  His paintings do not have the polished, satiny finish of his contemporary Vermeer. He painted quickly and could finish a work in a few days. The astonishing ruffle Beatrix wears is not painted with the care and detail other painters might have used.  Isaac looks like he’s going to slide off the bench, or fall off the side.  I’m also uneasy with Beatrix’s smile:  she’s smug, she’s happy, but the expression is a bit off, almost an embarrassed grin.  Was Hals painting fast and not interested in details?

Hals was very popular; he seems to have been the first choice among the Haarlem elite.  His paintings are everywhere:  portraits of rich burgers and their wives and daughters, single men setting out in life, genre pictures of singers, bar hounds and women of easy virtue, huge paintings of civic groups and militias: people, always people, and almost always the people he knew, the people of Haarlem.   Sadly, he outlived his popularity and was a bankrupt shortly before he died.

*Jane Austen would not have approved:  she ridicules Lydia for flashing her wedding ring to the neighbors: “we (Lydia & Wickham) overtook William Goulding in his curricle, so I was determined he should know it (that I was married), and so I let down the side-glass next to him, and took off my glove, and let my hand just rest upon the window frame, so that he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like any thing."
  Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up, and ran out of the room.

Rubens, Portrait of Sussanne Fourment (“Le Chapeau de Paille”), 1635; and Le Brun, Self Portrait, 1782; both in the National Gallery, London.

Here are two pictures:

When he was 58, Rubens painted this portrait of a woman with the red sleeves and the straw hat; Louise Vigée Le Brun, a minor society portraitist of the late 18^th century, painted the one below.  Her self-portrait imitates Rubens’ (she said so).  Rubens painted his wife’s sister, probably on the occasion of her wedding.

Gary Wills says Venetians commissioned wedding portraits of brides; he says the famous reclining Venus who appears to be masturbating is an example, if a bit extreme, among surviving examples of the genre.  Such pictures were thought to encourage the couple’s amorous instincts so as to start them off as lovers and as producers of the next generation.  This might be particularly important as marriages were arranged and the bride and groom may only have met once.  Getting an advance peek and a wee bit horny might be a good idea.

Rubens’ portrait of his future sister-in-law could be in this tradition.  One site I looked at claimed the red on her sleeves is the most striking part of the picture.  That comment is willfully stupid; her breasts, squeezed to bursting out of her bodice with excitement and anticipation, seize one’s attention immediately.  It looks like the lace that’s meant to cover her boobs has slipped a bit!  If I can draw my eyes away, her warm, dark eyes look into mine, her red lips smile, her cheeks are flushed, her hair, too, seems reddish.  The red on the sleeves reinforce the message, as red is the color of love and passion.  All the other colors are rich and lush.  The background is turbulent:  the wedding night will not be placid.  Rubens has left nothing out: the Flemish propagandist of the Counter Reformation has left us a very erotic picture.

Over 150 years later, le Brun (1755 – 1842) painted her self-portrait.  While Rubens was a devout Catholic and enthusiast of the counter-reformation, le Brun, a young French woman of whom I know little, lived in a more secular age and painted women of Versailles, a class noted for doubtful morals. Of course, this portrait is not a wedding portrait.  However, le Brun did choose such a portrait as her model.  Maybe this portrait is an advertisement; using a commissioned portrait as an ad before delivering it to the sitter was common enough among her English contemporaries.

On first glace, the self-portrait is demure:  a cool color of the dress – compared to the striking red --, a cooler, alabaster skin on the chest, and paler eyes.  The sky is cloudy, but not turbulent.  The dress hides more than it reveals. Le Brun stands back, the painter’s body withdraws from the canvas; Rubens is bolder, he is almost in his subject’s lap.  Le Brun holds her palette: this is a professional woman about her business; she just pauses to look at the artist and viewer.  Is the palette a shield to ward us off?  Or just a declaration of her profession?  This is a picture of a woman in public life, not an intimate portrait of a woman about to be married.

I can imagine an erotic undertone, I suppose, as if Le Brun wished to, but can’t, put more erotic energy into the picture.  The palette tugs at her dress, pulling the dress down to her left and giving a hint of her bust.  Her lips are red, there is a blush on her cheeks, and she looks directly at the viewer, more directly in fact, than Rubens’ subject. Sussanne Fourment’s head is tilted downwards; Le Brun accepts our gaze and encourages it. 

On the one hand, we have a professional artist promoting her trade, recommending her talent to potential customers.  On the other hand, she chose a call and response approach to Rubens’ portrait:  her pose, her hat, dress and eyes, cheeks and lips are there.  Its eroticism is downplayed, but she can’t eliminate it entirely.  It’s this tension between her professional requirements and her artistic and human response to Rubens that gives this portrait its power.

I like this portrait.  Le Brun has a decent talent; the painting shows us a lively, pretty, business like artist; if you commission a portrait from her, you’d get good value and not be bored sitting.

Thomas Lawrence, Pinkie, 1794, Huntington, San Marino, California

This sweet, innocent girl was born in Jamaica where he father owned a sugar plantation and the slaves to work it.  She was sent to England at age nine to be properly educated. Her aunt commissioned the painting to help her family remember her.  By the time Lawrence finished the painting, her father had “left” the family.  She died at age 12, less than a year after the portrait was finished.

Overly romantic and idealized, Pinkie floats with the clouds above her -- dark, ominous, stormy clouds. Did Lawrence foresee her death?  Did she already have the disease that killed her? 

Pinkie’s ribbons and dress float behind her, her hair is tousled, both blown by the breeze.  One push with her foot and she would become airborne like an angel.  She is still just a wisp of a thing, naïve and guileless, not yet corrupted with the confusion of puberty or the knowledge that “blood drawn with the lash” has brought her privilege.

The long energetic brush strokes animate the dress and reinforce the almost gossamer feel of the girl.  The dress captures the breeze as if a kite.  Pinkie gives us a hard stare, although we are drawn to her, she is not drawn to us.

The location of the artist is a bit mysterious – how did Lawrence get this perspective?  Was he lying on the ground?  Pinkie looks at us over the artist’s head – she doesn’t look past him, he doesn’t exist.  She engages us with a child’s direct glance.

Wordsworth’s poem so perfectly describes the painting, I wonder if he’d seen it.  Much more probably, the painting and the poem capture how the period thought of nubile girls.

SHE was a Phantom of delight  

When first she gleam'd upon my sight;  

A lovely Apparition, sent  

To be a moment's ornament:  

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;          

Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;  

But all things else about her drawn  

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;  

A dancing shape, an image gay,  

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

-- Wordsworth, 1807

Both Wordsworth or Lawrence are drawn to the girls they portray.  Wordsworth and his Phantom do not talk to each other; it’s not evident that the girl even notices Wordsworth while he observes hungrily from a distance.  Since Lawrence is painting a portrait, it’s hard for him to pretend Pinkie doesn’t know he’s there.  It seems, however, that Lawrence was more drawn to Pinkie than she was to him.

The next time you go to LA, make a detour to the Huntington in San Marino.  The room with a dozen or so full-length portraits by Lawrence and his contemporaries is one of the great artistic pleasures.

Rembrandt, “The Old Jew” in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 1654 and Titian, Portrait of Pietro Arentino, the Frick, New York, 1537.

Rembrandt lived in the Amsterdam ghetto or at the edge of it for some time; he had the opportunity to know and observe the Jewish population of Amsterdam.  He paints his subject with the same sympathy, attention and style as he painted his Protestant subjects.  This is in contrast to Shakespeare whose Merchant, on the whole, is unfair and hostile to Jews.

Perhaps there is some iconography in the portrait that distinguishes the old man as a Jew:  the hat, the style of his beard?  However, most of the Jews in Amsterdam in Rembrandt’s time were Sephardic, refugees from Spain and Portugal, and dressed without any required identifying clothing.  Nor were there any residential restrictions.

The immense weariness of the face, the roughness of the hands, the inward slump of the shoulders, the weight of his shabby clothes tell us the burdens of age and mankind prey on his mind and body.  He could be any one of Rembrandt’s old men or women.  Death of wife and children, disease and failing memory, financial vicissitudes, loss of friends, family and attacks of enemies – all this and more occupy his mind.  He looks sadly, pityingly, at us; he knows we will have his problems, cares, and heart ache by the time we reach his age.  Rembrandt’s masterful brush stokes, coloring, shadowing – I wish I could see this picture.

The picture haunts me:  I can’t get it out of my head.

In contrast, let’s look at Titian’s portrait of his friend Pietro Arentino.  Arentino is said to be the founder of modern European pornography, which got him in trouble with some popes and won favor from other popes.  He was also a poet and a satirist.  His dirty books are still in print.  Titian paints Pietro as a big man; the portrait suggests a powerful and thoughtful figure.  His arched eyebrows dominate his face and, in one possible reading, hint at an odd and untrustworthy man.  (Note the arch of brows reflected in the almond eyes and running down his nose).  He looks upward out of the far corner of his eye away from the viewers; unlike the Old Jew he does not seek to communicate with the viewer.  We can only speculate why.  The intensity of the gaze focused elsewhere is the psychological high point of this portrait.  Perhaps he is evasive or scheming, or perhaps he is dreaming as poets are supposed to do.  

For another reading, I can imagine he is about to break out into a smile or a grin.  He is about to share a joke with his friend, or something bon mot has just occurred to him which his readers will enjoy:  Titian will ask him, "What's so funny?"

His extensive fur scarf and shiny copper toned coat tell us he’s a man of some status.  Although a Venetian would have known from the clothing he was not a noble, I’ve known this portrait since college age visits to the Frick & always thought Pietro was a noble.

Two approaches to a portrait.  Rembrandt, through his subject, engages empathetically with the viewer, and across the centuries we care about the old man.  Titian’s subject ignores us:  he’s self-absorbed and does not share his thoughts at all.  Both portraits are, or appear to be, technical tours de force; only Rembrandt’s gives us a glimpse into the character of the sitter.  Perhaps Arentino was distant and abstracted and that is what Titian is trying to tell us.

And, anyway, his books are still in print.

Matisse, “Music Lesson,” 1917, Barnes Foundation

Here is a French family in during the first World War; although the outcome of the war was uncertain, the Germans never far from Paris, and Matisse’s mother was trapped behind enemy lines, for a moment at least, this family seems tranquil and peaceable. Matisse’s oldest child, Marguerite, gives Pierre, his youngest child, a piano lesson. We can always identify Marguerite, the boy’s half sister, in Matisse’s paintings because she had a tracheotomy and wore the black collar to hide the hole. Pierre is learning classical music and some of Haydn is on the piano top; perhaps Chopin is on the music stand.  Seated, smoking and reading, is the older brother Jean; he plays the string instrument.  I can’t remember if he played the violin or the viola.  The three siblings sit comfortably, tranquilly together; Jean does not mind the mistakes, the repetitions, and the interruptions of the music lesson.

In the garden, in the rocker, is Matisse’s wife Amélie, and behind her, a sculpture by Matisse.  Perhaps we can detect a bit of ambiguity in Matisse’s feelings for Amélie.  Her small size seems out of proportion to the others in the picture and the voluptuous nude draws our attention away from the lady of the house.  The sculpture strikes the same pose as his controversial Blue Nude, which he painted a decade earlier; Amélie was Matisse’s model for that picture.  A sort of self-referential joke, perhaps, but placing a nude sculpture of his wife behind a picture of her gives me an uneasy feeling.

The painting on the wall is Matisse’s Woman on a High Stool.  It is typical of Matisse to reference his own paintings in his works.  A bit narcissistic?

I believe this is one of Matisse’s most intimate paintings.

A red piano!  But, for Matisse, the colors, bright and exciting, rub along harmoniously and are not jarring or unexpected.  The floor is the color of wood; the garden, the color of plants; the nude, the color of a nude.  The arabesque work of the music stand carries over in the grille work at the edge of the balcony and the sides of the rocker.  The swirls of the garden plants echo those of the balcony.

Unlike the previous paintings, this painting is completely comfortable; a hundred kilometers away young men are dying by the tens of thousands, but this family, on this beautiful day, has put the war aside.  

Francisco Goya, Shootings of May 3, 1808.   1814, Prado

Napoleon’s armies have invaded Spain and taken Madrid, but, after more or less passive acquiescence, on May 2, 1808 the people of Madrid rioted.  Murat, Napoleon’s general, rounded up the usual suspects and shot the lot. 

The French atrocities and the cruelty of war turned Goya into an anti-war artist of the first rank.  This painting, his Charge of the Mamelukes, and his series of etchings Los desastres de la Guerra set a standard that only Picasso’s Guernica and a few other artists (mostly German) can equal. 

Here Goya painted the French firing squad at work; some of the victims lie before it, bleeding, futilely grasping at blood soaked dirt.  The firing squad, although somewhat differentiated by the color of their coats, remains faceless; the enforcers of the regime’s ruthlessness are not individuals. 

The firing squad’s bodies bend forward with their rifles; their hats, white packs and other equipment make a strong diagonal setting up a frame within the frame.  On the other side of picture, of the execution yard, are the victims, those about to die, and those awaiting their turns.  They too form a diagonal, and with the hill behind them, enclosing the frontal plane of the picture.  The night sky and cityscape of Madrid only fill space and create sense of claustrophobia. In the background is a church, perhaps the cathedral of Madrid.  Goya chose to place a church in the background:  while the event pictured happened, the setting is Goya’s doing.  

With the mound of dirt and diagonals of the bodies, Goya blocks out nature and man’s built world:  neither are not relevant to the murder occurring in front of us.

Note that the blue green of the soldiers’ coats echoes in the soon-to-be-shot friar’s habit and the red of the third soldier echo the blood of the victims and the pants of the man covering his eyes. 

The focus of attention is the poor, unknown man about to be shot.  His hands and arms raised, he looks like Christ on the cross.  In fact, his right hand bears the stigma of the nail in Christ’s palm.  A bright light from mysterious source illuminates him, singling out an anonymous victim of mass murder.  Previously, artists reserved the stigmata for Christ and St. Francis; Goya transfers these signs to a poor worker.  Not a lot of ambiguity about what Goya thinks of the French and those Spaniards who oppose them.

Once again the state and the powerful shoot the dispossessed their barbarity.  We do not know who the victims are, our martyrs are nameless; no one will name them a saint, no one will write a book about them; there will be no holiday in their honor.  We will visit the grave of the Unknown Soldier:  our heroes no longer have names.