Travels in Vermeer by Michael White

by the infamous Pittsburgh tycoon Henry Clay Frick, in 1913, to accommodate his personal collection of paintings and other art objects. When he died in 1919, he left the building, including all the furnishings and art, with an endowment, and so The Frick Collection was born.
    Both buildings were residences—palatial, but lived-in residences, which makes them ideal for experiencing a Vermeer. The hot, seventeenth-century, Dutch art market, driven by a newly wealthy middle class buying up paintings for fashionable homes (when they weren’t investing in tulips), was domestic and secular in nature. Smaller paintings, especially portraits or exotic still-lifes—filled with the luxury items a maritime economy could provide—were in. The idea of seeing a real Vermeer in somebody’s living room boggles the mind nowadays, but that’s the right setting for this artist’s eye-level interiors, and the Frick or the Mauritshuis is as close as one gets to that experience.
    The first painting I see in the Frick, in the passageway called the South Hall, is a small, jewel-like Vermeer: Officer with Laughing Girl (c. 1655–60). Kees Kaldenbach had called this painting “extraordinarily luminous,” and it’s clear, as soon as I turn the corner, why he’d said that. In this early genre piece, Vermeer imagines a relationship between the officer and the young woman that not only reflects light but, like most of the Vermeers I’ve seen, this one actually seems to glow. The seemingly casual placement—in a murky passageway, among period marble and velvet furnishings—only emphasizes its alchemical radiance.
    Officer with Laughing Girl seems especially vulnerable, too, hanging alone and so close to the museum’s outer doors, and this vulnerability is heightened by the fact that none of the paintings here are covered with glass.
    I give Officer with Laughing Girl a wide berth at first. I linger in its vicinity. Passers-by on their way to the great galleries at the end of the hall, filled with big canvases by Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, say, “Look! A Vermeer!” Just as in all the other museums. But when we’re alone again, I zoom in. To do this, I have to lean over a gilt-painted antique chair, placed directly beneath the painting. A gold, tasseled rope is laid across its gold satin cushion, embroidered with cupids and bizarre, winged busts—in order to keep onlookers back, I suppose. It doesn’t completely work, in my case. The gorgeousness of the painting prompts me to lean precariously over the chair, until I trigger the motion sensor. I’ve done this often enough, in other museums, to feel only a little shame when the alarm beeps. A smiling young guard with tight cornrows—wearing a maroon jacket like a Shriner—appears discreetly to my left. We exchange nods as I back off.
    Again and again, when I glance up, my breath catches in my throat. The feeling isn’t Here is art , but Here is life .
    As critics point out, Officer with Laughing Girl comes directly (much more directly than Vermeer’s later work) out of the mid-century genre tradition. It bears a striking resemblance especially to Pieter De Hooch’s The Card Players. Vermeer painted only a few such scenes, and these early works culminate in Officer with Laughing Girl . Edward Snow says this painting has “the feeling more of a last than a first work.” In fact it was a last work of sorts, as, after this, Vermeer settled almost completely on the solitary subject, his calling all along. Snow spends the middle portion of his book thinking about three further exceptions in the oeuvre, The Concert, Couple Standing at a Virginal, and An Artist in His Studio, all depictions of groups or couples. He calls these paintings “reflections on the matrix within which his solitary women take shape.”
    The window at left in Officer with Laughing Girl, especially the sun-infused