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.