position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’s Lady with Lute. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually creates.
Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s Lady Writing and The Lace-Maker of the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground. Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling, and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre.
It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly excel the Girl with Water-Jug of the Metropolitan Museum. For the latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the resonance of blue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced. Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion; nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking something of the exquisite finesse of the above two pictures and of certain other examples.
Occasionally, as in The Coquette of the Brunswick Gallery, A Lady at a Spinet, in the National Gallery, and The Music Lesson, owned by Mr. Henry C. Frick, the figures display a consciousness of themselves or of the onlooker; their personality looks out from its own surroundings. On the other hand, it is rather a characteristic of Vermeer as of Terborch, that the people in his pictures seem immersed in themselves. The scene is wrapped in privacy, undisturbed by the suggestion of an outsider. But the most signal instance of a scene, actually arranged, and posed as if to be viewed by others, is the example of The Artist in His Studio, in the Czernin Gallery, Vienna. In color and mingled breadth and delicacy of treatment it is superb; but in place of the artist’s usual sincerity of feeling, it is possible to detect a suspicion of affectation.
THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
CZERNIN GALLERY, VIENNA