The Most Beautiful Painting in the World... According to Proust

Jan Vermeer's View of Delft (1660-1661) may just be a perfect landscape painting. Once you've really looked at it, you realize it's the kind of thing you don't forget, that you could spend hours - a lifetime! - dreaming over it and still not have your fill. I've never seen the actual painting, but I'm captivated by the images of it that I've seen.

No great painting emerges out of pure invention, and Vermeer was building upon the solid foundations of the Dutch landscape tradition. We can see this in the painting's scale, its low horizon line, the overall color and luminosity, and the big cumulus clouds casting their shadow on the waterfront while the area awash in sunlight peeps out behind. Here's a landscape by Van Ruisdael that puts the foreground in cloud shadow.

Jacob Van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields, 1671

Yet, the poise, charm, and energy of Vermeer's design makes View of Delft unique. It's got an incredible degree of balance and integration between highly varied yet somehow harmonious elements!

It's arranged in a series of broad and irregular horizontal bands,"counterbalanced by smaller varied vertical units" (I'm relying for most of this on A.C. Barnes's analysis which appears as an appendix to his quirky yet rigorous The Art in Painting). And this series of graceful rhythmical divisions and subdivisions interpenetrate and integrate with each other so as to unify the whole.

Radiography shows that Vermeer deliberately extended the reflections to the extreme right, the effect of which is to unify top and bottom and further anchor the whole design.

The cloud band forms "a series of three predominately vertical units; the row of buildings and trees is rhythmically subdivided by a more pronounced and varied pattern of upright elements, the gables, steeples, towers.

The reflections in the water carry the subsidiary vertical elements of the pattern to the area of the canal, and the figures (there are 15), the two posts, and the prow of the ship function likewise in the foreground bank." (Barnes, p. 455)

Each band's color notes contrast with those of the band it touches, and the general color tone thus produced for each area of the painting (the sky, the blue-red-green masses in the center, the water, the bank) contrasts with and sets off that of its neighbors.

Throughout, the drawing, which is accomplished through color and light, is expressive and not overwrought, highlighting the essential character of each aspect of the subject, whether the sun-baked brick, the green masses of  trees, the slightly blurred reflections, the figures, or the space-relationships between the elements. 

A treatise could be written on the how Vermeer expressed "the theme of blue and red, varied with minor motifs of gray and green," in the row of buildings and trees. The color notes are predominately an earthy red and a blue "of extraordinary sensuous and structural quality, which is the key-note in this part of the design, and indeed is so powerfully eloquent as to be chiefly responsible for the individuality of the entire picture." (ibid)

French novelist Marcel Proust pits the exquisite beauty of one minute detail of the painting against the life of a character in one of his stories. The painting wins.

For a delightful commentary on Proust's use of the painting, along with the relevant excerpt, you have to check out this person's blog entry (and don't miss the comment on Aldous Huxley's pick for the most beautiful painting in the world.) 

Flemish Still Life: Feast for the Eyes and the Mind

Still-life with Peeled Lemon, Jan Davidsz. de HEEM

What a harvest is here in this still-life painting by the Flemish Baroque-period painter Jan Davidsz. de HEEM (1606-1684): a wooden table draped with a gold-fringed green velvet cloth, a glass of white wine and a cluster of white grapes hanging from a vine branch with large, veined leaves, a pewter dish supporting a peeled lemon, a cooked shrimp and a scattering of hazelnuts, behind which is a bowl full of strawberries and, to the left, a shucked oyster, and behind that, the handle of a knife.

But the painting's real essence is none of those things. Rather, it is this canvas's sombre atmosphere with its evocation of silence, luxury, stillness, and sensuous delight. The objects don't so much sit or stand as emerge from the enveloping dark.

Another still-life by De Heem. Note the snail slithering past the foreground oyster. (Ew!)

To step up the pleasure even more, most still-life paintings of this time period and geography contain a marvelous overlay of symbolic meanings. Present for original viewers who wished to read into them, each of the objects carried well-known associations accrued from their use in popular religious and moralist writings and sermons (the butterfly perched on top might suggest the soul, the fancy glassware and knife-handle signified preoccupation with material wealth, while strawberries and oysters pointed toward lust). Often the imagery preached a mini-sermon on the inevitability of mortality and the importance of looking after the upkeep of one's soul in preparation for the afterlife. So often is this the case that art historians refer to this type of painting as "vanitas" still life (for the theme of earthly "vanity," as in the Ecclesiastical "vanity, vanity, vanity, sayeth the preacher, all is vanity - vanitas omni est).

In this case, tiny details you can't see in this jpeg - the presence of various parasitic insects, wilting leaves, overripe or subtly rotting grapes, a worm-hole in one of the hazelnuts - remind the viewer of the transience of even the ripest, most luxuriant life in the material world.

Detail from a different Dutch still life.

Even without the symbolism, Old Master still life paintings from the Dutch and Flemish Schools continue to delight viewers. My own theory about why is not that they're so photographic-realistic, but that they're both hyper-realistic and super-artificial all at once.

The shadows are voluptuously exaggerated, the textures chosen and explored for their own sake, the colors carefully keyed to each other, and the multiple levels of reference constitute an unapologetic artifice right from the start. Further, the combination of the rich yet muted colors and the sparkling realism of the lights and textures captivates modern viewers on two delightfully divergent fronts - on one hand, we read the classically balanced composition and the harmonious, tonal palette as the artist's inventions, evidence of the artificial nature of art-making. Simultaneously, on the other hand, we read the exquisite details as the opposite - as convincing evidence of art's ability to render the real with supreme truth, to give us the wetness of water and the woodness of wood - it's there in the sparkling water droplets, the luminosity of the fruit, the nubbly (impasto) texture of the orange peel and the seduction of the velvet. Here is the Louvre's commentary on Still-Life with Peeled Lemon, (which I find rather masterful in its own way):

De Heem is a masterly painter of light and reflections, as seen here on the dish and glasses, or the droplets of water. Here, too, we see his virtuoso rendering of the fine, misty covering of bloom on the skin of the grapes, the veins of the vine leaves, and their infinite variations of color. The picture's thriving insect population, crawling around the fruit and other objects, creates a secondary world all of its own, waiting to be discovered upon close examination by the attentive viewer. A caterpillar climbs up the vine branch, which creates a striking diagonal across the upper part of the composition. A second butterfly has alighted at the end of the branch. A spider has made its home in one of the grapes and a hornet is making its way around the edge of the bowl of strawberries. These tiny living creatures may hold some residual symbolic significance – insects are traditionally associated with the concept of vanity (from the Latin vanitas), the transience and futility of earthly life. The same concept is expressed by the withered, diseased vine leaf, the rotten grape, or the small worm-hole in the hazelnut next to the lemon. Above all, these details testify to De Heem's supreme technique and visionary approach to still-life painting, his abilty to transform one corner of a dinner-table into a small, private universe.

Jan Davidsz. de Heem succeeds triumphantly in depicting the tactile values of his chosen objects, and their slow emergence from the penumbra of the picture's plain, dark green ground. An artist of remarkable distinction, he settled in the city of Antwerp, where the practice of still-life painting took a wide variety of forms – from the art of the greatest animal painters and masters of baroque still-life (such as Jan Fyt or Frans Snyders, who often collaborated with Rubens), to the more austere output of painters such as Jacob Fopsen van Es. Their diverse images depict a world of silence and apparent stillness, imbued with tiny signs of life, and touched by the immutable forces of time and decay.

Constable's Clouds Redux & Big Dutch Skies

Here's an exciting Constable landscape that, if walked through carefully, will reveal a number of its secrets quite readily.

The name of this painting is Harwich Lighthouse, and Constable painted it around 1820 (same time as the cloud sketches in the previous post). It's from that Australian Web exhibit I told you about, and you can see their page on it here. See how he confines the sunlight to the middle ground? When you realize that the foreground shadow is from a passing cloud, you get that the lighthouse and the little fellow walking along the path are just there for scale, and this whole painting is really just an excuse to paint the sky!

The relatively few fans Constable garnered in his lifetime were blown away by the sense of place in this and other paintings, that is, by his fidelity to nature and the downright Englishness of his English countrysides. He's beloved by his nation today because ultimately his work woke up the English to the beauty and poetry of their own country.

But his early admirers also recognized in his work a then-fashionable nod to Dutch Old Master landscape painting. The Dutch were the first to establish a tradition of "pure" landscape - depictions of natural scenery free from narrative content, often with little or no human presence.

Above is a painting by Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1663) that to me feels similar to Constable's lighthouse painting. In both paintings, a few relatively small vertical shapes project above the horizon, which immediately gives way to the big sky and clouds. Both paintings show us objects getting smaller as they recede in space, drawing our eyes into the painting and toward that luminous line between earth (or water) and sky. Speaking of perspective, look back at the lighthouse at the top of the page. Note where your eye travels as you look at it. The coastal path takes us to the ostensible point of interest, the lighthouse, and then jags right and shoots our gaze along the line of light, right to the little ramp of land jutting up like a runway into the big wide sky, which is where Constable secretly wanted to launch our attention all along.

And this is another Dutch Old Master with a coastal (rather than marine) subject matter. As you can see, giving over two-thirds of the canvas to the sky is "very Dutch." It's clear that Constable wasn't the first to be fascinated by the dynamism of nature. Have a look at this Rembrandt, now.

Rembrandt uses what's today known as an "Old Master palette," which means it's limited to earth tones, black, and white. Though he learned a ton from the Dutch painters about painting landscapes, Constable discarded the Old Master palette, as did the Impressionists who admired Constable's work for its freshness.

Each of these paintings gives us a great sense of the vastness of sky and the beauty and volatility of the natural world we inhabit. We'll be revisiting the Old Masters many times in posts to come.

Velasquez: Water from the Source

Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velasquez's (1599-1660) Waterseller of Seville is what's known as a genre painting, a scene from everyday life, as opposed to a portrait or a scene from history, mythology, or the Bible, the primary subjects for European paintings of the post-Renaissance period. It's a virtuosos performance for the young Velazquez, who was only 20 when he painted it.

No one had ever treated the everyday life on the streets of Spain's cities with such depth and majesty, lavishing on the low-life the level of attention and dignity reserved for scenes from the life of Christ. This was a radical change in what could be done with art (even after Caravaggio); contemporaries called the paintings "bodegones," from bodegon, as in "bodega," basically a pub.

Jonathon Jones vividly describes the scene: "The vendor's face is downcast, expecting nothing, not looking at the boy to whom he gives water in a clean, fine glass with a black fig to freshen the taste. In the shadows another customer drinks. The water-seller seems unaware of either; as if in deference to his sorrow, the boy looks down. He respects the poverty and age of the street-seller, as does Velazquez, who gives the man an immense dignity.... This painting crackles with Seville's scorching heat. The water-seller's robe (torn like a saint's) has a flaky, crisp texture. His face, around his mouth, is marked by deep canyons like dried-up river beds. His beard is desert grass, his hair shaved short, in contrast to the boy's lively locks. He touches the water jar, on the surface of which three drops of water glisten, shining globules of life."

Velasquez leads us into the painting through a series of linked, rounded shapes. The large water jug, with its arresting range of wet and dry, smooth and rough textures, bulges toward us, its swelling form echoed by the seller's rotund body. Our gaze travels to the smaller clay jug, to the old man's hand above it, then to the glass and the two faces, the old man's and the boy's, downcast but radiant in light, and we notice a third face hovering between them.

Velasquez's followers painted bodegones, but never with such vision and compassion. Velasquez's ability to see profound human significance in the ordinary, and his poetic reverence for the real over the religious, prompted Ortega y Gasset to exclaim, “Velasquez is an atheist giant, a godless colossos. With his brush he sweeps away the gods as with a broom. He is our painter. He paved the way for our irreligious era, an administrative age in which, instead of talking about Dionysus, we speak of alcoholism.”

Unlike the cheerful Dutch peasant-life genre scenes from which Velasquez drew inspiration, this painting imparts a gritty realism and a sombre depth of humanity that Velasquez ratchets up to the level of parable or fable. Indeed, commentators have seen in it an allegory of the three stages in the life of man – the model for the old man was Velasquez’s master, who posed for it, the boy was the painter’s apprentice, and in the center is Velasquez, in a subtle self portrait – he occupies the middle ground in age, the observer hiding in the shadows, taking in the entire spectacle of life.

Vermeer: A Stillness in Mirrors

The Art of Painting (1665-1666; oil on canvas, 47x40) by Jan Vermeer

For a while, Dutch artist Jan Vermeer (1632-75) lived like a king, amassing an extraordinary collection of "curiosities" - exotic seashells, ancient sculpture, rich silks, books, tapestries, paintings, maps, historical weapons and armor ... but when he died, his wife had to forfeit the estate and sell off his paintings (which nobody wanted) just to keep herself and their 11 children out of debtor's prison.

Lyme Connecticut artist Jerry N. Weiss has published a wonderful interpretation of Jan Vermeer's The Art of Painting (1665-1666) in The Artist's Magazine this month. His article strikes a balance between explaining the painting's content and celebrating the artist's technical and aesthetic achievements.

Vermeer was supreme, Weiss writes, in his ability to use "the physical property of light to evoke a revelatory experience in everyday life." The light in Vermeer is bewitching; it's directional but never harsh, and the way it reveals form and color allows us to sense the very quality of the air it passes through.

Weiss nods briefly to the painting's typically Dutch allegorical symbolism before passing on to highlight the work's remarkable clarity, its precise, asymmetrical design, its "cool reserve and pitch-perfect tones." The stillness is almost like that of a reflection in a mirror. Vermeer suspends and plays his two figures off of each other by turning them gracefully in opposite directions, almost like dancers, balancing the model's left-pointing trumpet with the artist's right-pointing mahl stick and literally drawing lines (the map's border) between to connect them.

Vermeer's finesse is even more remarkable given the chaos of his life. He may have been a creative genius, but to his eventual downfall, he had only one main patron, a wealthy merchant in his hometown of Delft, who bought up Vermeer's painstakingly crafted paintings but thereby kept the artist's fame from spreading. When the French suddenly invaded the country, the Dutch economy collapsed, and disposable income for luxury items like paintings dried up. Jan was stuck, and not even his day job (art dealer=more luxury!) could save him.

How visionary then, the special stillness in Vermeer's "self portrait," partly the result, as Weiss's piece suggests, of its magical combination of cool light and complex pattern. Vermeer's poetic vignettes transcend the narrative, as his figures transcend their settings, interacting "as if in a dream suspended."

What really moves us in Vermeer's The Art of Painting, Weiss concludes, is how it imparts, even after 400 years, "the blessing of absolute stillness, the Zen of north light." Hear, hear.