I spent four hours in the gallery, two of which were spent solely in front of Woman with a Pearl Necklace. I looked at it from close up. I looked at it from several feet away. I looked at it from either side. I counted drops of light and scribbled down the numbers. I recorded the painting’s elements, working to decipher the murky folds of the large cloth in the foreground. I noted the woman’s hands, her orange ribbon, her earring, the yellow of her ermine-trimmed jacket, the mirror frame, the light. I never touched the painting, of course, but once I was reprimanded by a guard. Perhaps my nose came too close to the paint or perhaps my obsessive focus on one painting struck him as slightly deranged. He waved me off, and I made an attempt to look less awed and more professional. There was a bench in that room, and after my dance of distances, I sat down on it and looked at the canvas for a long time. The more I looked at it, the more it overwhelmed me with a feeling of fullness and mystery. I knew what I was looking at, and yet I didn’t know. I had to ask myself what I was seeing and why it had become an experience so powerful, I felt I couldn’t have lasted another hour without crying. It seemed to me that both because of and despite its particularity, Woman with a Pearl Necklace was something other than what it appeared to be. This is an odd statement to make about a painting, which is literally “appearance,” and yet I couldn’t help feeling that the mystery of the painting was pulling me beyond that room and its solitary woman.
Every viewing of a painting is private, an experience between the spectator and the image, and yet I would wager that the feelings evoked by this painting are remarkably similar, particularly for those who aren’t burdened with historical interpretations and the problem of puzzling out Vermeer’s intentions. Even the most cursory glance at Vermeer scholarship suggests that there is much disagreement. But I am not an art historian, and those disputes won’t come into the story until later. My intention that day was simply to look at this painting, to study it with fresh eyes, and to let the painting and only the painting direct my thoughts. In that gallery in the museum, I looked at the profile of a young woman who is apparently looking at herself in a small mirror. The mirror is only slightly larger than her own face and is represented by its frame only. In fact, the viewer assumes there is glass in the frame only because of the way the woman stands and gazes toward it. But what we imagine she is seeing — her own face — is not part of the painting. The window is so close to the mirror, and its light so clear and dominant on the canvas, that whether she is transfixed by the mirror or by the window isn’t entirely clear. My first impression of the painting was that she was looking at the window, although the longer I looked at it, the less sure I became. The woman’s gaze is not dreamy but active, the focus of her eyes direct; and although her feet cannot be seen under the shadowed folds of her skirt, they seem to be firmly planted on the floor. Her soft lips aren’t smiling, but there is the barest upward tilt at the visible corner of her mouth. And yet there is no feeling that she is about to smile or that her expression will change anytime soon. Her hands aren’t moving either. She isn’t tying the necklace. She has stopped in mid-gesture and is standing motionless. One look at The Lacemaker (also in the show), a painting in which a girl’s fingers are caught in action, confirmed for me that the hands of the woman with the pearls are frozen. In fact, the painting is stillness itself — a woman alone and motionless in a room. I am looking in at her solitude, and she cannot see me.
In a number of Vermeer’s paintings, the spectator is seen. Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Pearl Earring (both in the Washington show) are paintings in which the spectator and the subject exchange looks, and although neither of these paintings is large, each depicts a partial rather than a whole body. We see only the upper body of the girl with the hat, and only the head and shoulder of the girl with the earring. This focus on faces creates intimate access into the painting for the viewer — two faces meet for what becomes an eternal moment. On the other hand, the woman with the necklace doesn’t acknowledge the presence of any onlookers, and the viewer is barred from entrance to the room on two counts. First, the small size of the painting, which holds her entire body, places her in another perspective from that of the onlooker: my dimensions are radically different from hers. And second, the entire foreground of the painting — a large chair and a table draped with dark cloth and topped with a gleaming black covered jar — would have to be shoved aside before anyone from the viewer’s position could even imagine stepping into the luminous space she occupies.
So what’s happening in this room? The woman trying on her necklace is young, pretty, and beautifully dressed, but she is not preening in front of her reflection. Nothing about her expression or posture suggests vanity. On the table, it is possible to see part of a bowl and a powder brush, but these objects, even if she has recently used them, are forgotten things. They are pulled into the shadow of the dark foreground, which forbids entrance and makes the empty space of light between the woman and mirror more dramatic. While I was looking at the painting, I realized that I had picked it because of its empty center, a quality that distinguished it from other, related works. The painting was hanging in a room with three other great Vermeer paintings of women alone: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, and Woman Holding a Balance. In all of these paintings, women occupy a space that is illuminated by a far window on the left as you face the canvas (although the window in Woman in Blue is implied, rather than depicted, by the source of light that illuminates her page). In the three other paintings there is a map or painting somewhere on the wall in the room. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace there is nothing but light.
It turns out that Vermeer changed his mind. Arthur Wheelock, in his short essay on the painting in the catalog, which I read fitfully while I was in the museum, writes that neutron autoradiography of the canvas shows that there was once a map on that shining wall and, moreover, a musical instrument, probably a lute, sitting on the chair. The great folds of cloth in the foreground also covered considerably less of the tile floor. By simplifying the painting, by allowing fewer elements to remain, Vermeer altered the work’s effect and meaning forever. The map, which can be seen in the neutron autoradiograph reproduced in the catalog, was located behind the woman’s upper body, and even in the small and foggy picture in the catalog, the map draws the viewer back to the wall and gives that surface greater dimension and flatness. By eliminating the map, Vermeer got rid of an object that would have made a geometric cut between the woman’s eyes and the window. The map would have interrupted the line of her gaze and disturbed its directness. And had it remained, it would inevitably have called to mind a geography beyond that room, the possibility of travel — of the outside. In the painting’s final form, the outside is represented only by light. The instrument would have evoked music, and even the suggestion of sound would have changed the painting, distracting the viewer from its profound hush. By increasing the size of the cloth in the foreground, Vermeer further protected the woman from intrusion. This technology of looking through a painting and exposing it like a palimpsest gives a rare glimpse into art as a movement toward something that is not always known at the outset. As he worked, Vermeer’s idea about what he was doing was transformed by what he himself saw, and what he saw during the process and came to paint was something simpler and more sacred than what he had imagined to begin with.