If the Dutch Government, stimulated to gratitude for the encomiastic character of the present book, were to offer me my choice of the Ryks Museum pictures I should not hesitate a moment. I should take No. 2527—“Woman Reading a Letter” (damaged), by Vermeer of Delft. You will see a reproduction in black and white on the opposite page; but how wide a gulf between the picture and the process block. The jacket, for example, is the most lovely cool blue imaginable.
The Reader
Jan Vermeer
From the picture in the Ryks Museum
This picture, apart from its beauty, is interesting as an illustration of the innovating courage of Vermeer. Who else at that date would have placed the woman’s head Page 179against a map almost its own colour? Many persons think that such daring began with Whistler. It is, however, Terburg who most often suggests Whistler. Vermeer had, I think, a rarer distinction than Terburg. Vermeer would never have painted such a crowded group (however masterly) as that of Terburg’s “Peace of Munster” in our National Gallery; he could not have brought himself so to pack humanity. Among all the Dutch masters I find no such fastidious aristocrat.
He, Vermeer, has another picture at the Ryks—“De brief” (No. 2528)—which technically is wonderful; but the whole effect is artificial and sophisticated, very different from his best transparent mood.
Any mortification, by the way, which I might suffer from the knowledge that No. 2527 can never be mine is allayed by the knowledge, equally certain, that it can never be any one else’s. Money is powerless here. To the offer of a Rothschild the Government would return as emphatic a negative as to a request from me.
The room in which is Vermeer’s “Reader” contains also Maes’s “Spinning Woman” (see page [230]), two or three Peter de Hoochs and the best Jan Steen in the Ryks. It is indeed a room to linger in, and to return to, indefinitely. De Hooch’s “Store Room” (No. 1248), of which I have already spoken, is in one of the little “Cabinet piece” rooms, which are not too well lighted. Here also one may spend many hours, and then many hours more.
The “Peace of Munster” has been called Terburg’s masterpiece: but the girl in his “Paternal Advice,” No. 570 at the Ryks, seems to me a finer achievement. The grace and beauty and truth of her pose and the miraculous painting of her dress are unrivalled. Yet judged as a picture it is, I think, dull. The colouring is dingy, time Page 180has not dealt kindly with the background; but the figure of the girl is perfect. I give a reproduction opposite page [190]. It was this picture, in one of its replicas, that Goethe describes in his Elective Affinities: a description which procured for it the probably inaccurate title “Parental Advice”.