Travels in Vermeer by Michael White Read Free Book Online Page A

Schama thinks Vermeer had been forced to paint Delft from the south because the 1654 Thunderclap had leveled the entire northeast quarter. He doesn’t entirely convince me. I can see that this prospect offers one enormous advantage to Vermeer: distance. Here, and only here, can we look at the city across the widest breadth of the Kolk. From this point, Delft might as well be an island.
    The triangular Kolk spreads before me, in outline unchanged from the seventeenth-century, the two steeples in exactly the same positions across the water as in the painting. The water ripples, full of silvery reflections. On the right-hand side of the view is a traditional Dutch herring bus, moored in exactly the same place as the two in the painting. Its broad, rounded ends; clean whitewash; heavy, varnished mast; and especially, the archaic, varnished leeboards are the real thing. The sky is a bright and high-ceilinged North Sea sky, almost as dramatic as the one in the painting.
    Otherwise, looking at the vista as it is, against the memory of the painting that utterly outshines it, is challenging. Old Delft is celebrated for its state of preservation, and it is almost perfectly preserved, except for the outermost walls on this end, the brick-and-limestone ramparts, gates, and towers from the Golden Age; in other words, except for nearly everything depicted in Vermeer’s painting. An apartment building or two, built in the 1960s, dominate the left-hand side of the vista (Kaldenbach had warned me, rather dejectedly, about this). As for the steeples, the Oude Kerk is now barely visible; the Nieuwe Kerk is dingy with age, but is still imposing. To the right of the bridge, where the main Delft canal enters the Kolk, there is a white storefront with signs reading “CartridgeWorld.” Buses, houseboats, opportunistic gulls.
    I wander along a long, narrow canal around the Kolk. But before I enter the city, I glance back toward Vermeer’s standpoint on the other side. The day is just beginning. Two of the girls (I recognize an orange bikini, pink bikini), one after the other, dive soundlessly into the leaden waters. Their white feet flash into the little salvoes they make, like the feet in Bruegel the Elder’s Icarus . If I’d thought to ask their names, I could have put them here.
    6. A Grave
    Then I turn and lose myself almost immediately in bystreets and bridges, aiming for the Markt and the site of Maria Thins’ house, the last Vermeer residence and his principal studio (Maria Thins was the mother of Vermeer’s wife, Catharina). It’s mostly wrong turns, of course. In the mid-morning lull, I take a seat in a café directly behind the Nieuwe Kerk. The proprietress stands chatting in Dutch for a while before she notes my blank smile and says, “You fooled me,” as she points toward the hometown newspaper unfolded before me. (I’m only looking at the pictures.) “Looking for Vermeer,” I say. She nods vaguely over there, over there , and sets down my café au lait.
    A little while later, I’m staring at a plaque on a corner in Oude Langendijk, right off the Markt, that marks the site of the Vermeer house. The plaque is the work of Dr. Kaldenbach:
    The home of Delft artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) once stood on this corner. He lived here in “Papenhoek,” the Catholic quarter, with his wife, Catharina Bolnes. In his first-floor studio on the street side of the building, Vermeer painted his famous cityscapes and interiors filled with magical light….
    Today, the sprawling, nineteenth-century Maria van Jesse Catholic Church occupies the block of the Oude Langendijk where Maria Thins’ house once stood. The actual space of the Vermeer home is now taken up by a very small side-chapel with its own, tiny entrance off an alley. No one’s inside when I go in and sit. The pews face north, the left side is outer wall, the right a barred entrance to the main nave,