What a moron! I forgot to take a picture of the Frick mansion. So this Upper East Side town house will have to do. It’s the closest thing that I could find in my files, not that I went through every image on the computer. The photograph was taken in June 2009. Next time, I’ll take a picture of the Frick.

Which Ray Soleil and I visited today in order to see the pictures from the Mauritshuis, especially Het Puttertje (The Goldfinch), by Carel Fabritius. I had seen the picture before, but I had forgotten how small it really is, and how easily it could be carried off in a tote bag — almost any shopping bag would be more than roomy enough. It’s nine by thirteen-something inches. But The Goldfinch doesn’t look like a small picture. It is the very opposite of a miniature. Had I ever seen I goldfinch myself, I might venture an opinion on how close to life-sized the painting is, but it seems quite close to life-sized. When you are looking at this little bird on his food-box — opening the hinged lid with its beak was one of the bird’s tricks — that is all that you need to see.

The bird seems alive, partly because of the painter’s mastery of trompe-l’oeil, but mostly in spite of it. What I mean is that the bird’s shadow is immediately deceptive, creating the illusion of depth in which a physical object might exist. But the figure of the bird casts a very different illusion: not so much of reality as of motion. We never doubt that we are looking at a painting. But it is a painting that is animated by the spirit of a living thing. The bird flutters; we cannot make it stop.

In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s novel — which contrived to be published the very day that the Mauritshuis exhibition opened — Theo Decker’s mother (in one of the very last moments of Before) tells him how fond she was of this painting as a girl in Kansas, poring over a reproduction in a book.

And, I mean, actually it’s incredible how much you can learn about a paiting by spending a lot of time with a reproduction, even not a very good reproduction. I started off loving the bird, the way you’d love a pet or something, and ended up loving the way it’s painted.

Theo’s mom doesn’t have anything very profound to say about Fabritius’s painting, but then neither does Walter Liedtke, the Vermeer scholar who wrote up Het Puttertje for the catalogue to the exhibition, Vermeer and the Delft School, that was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London in the spring of 2001. What is there to say? There is only to see. At the Delft School show, I was far more taken by Fabritius’s much larger picture, The Sentry. It’s mysterious in many ways. With its pointless (but very arresting) Doric column, the architecture behind the reclining man has an almost Mannerist puzzlement about it: it’s deliberately not making complete sense. And its expanses of whitewashed masonry, basking in pale sunlight, display the same stippled complication that the painting also teaches us to see in Vermeer’s interiors. Here it is the walls that seem to move. The space is somehow alive. Vermeer mastered the trick and used it to create the pensive, breathing stillness in which so many of his solitary women stand.

***

After Ray and I took in the Mauritshuis exhibition, we toured the Frick’s permanent collection, which includes a magnificent Rembrandt portrait, of one Nicolaes Ruts, presumably a man of sufficient substance to warrant his fine linen ruff and fur-trimmed robe. Perhaps this picture is too magnificent: looking at it, all I can think of is the Fabian Bachrach studio portrait of my father, which as I recall made use of similarly dramatic backlighting. This effect is of no intrinsic interest; it is there simply to flatter the sitter, and it does. It is wonderfully done, but uninviting, as if its only secondary purpose were to warn the viewer against noticing such things. As backgrounds go, it is the very negative of Fabritius’s stippled complication.

In Rembrandt’s portrait, Nicolaes Ruts has been abstracted from his everyday world (which might have been very grand) and posed in a never-land of isolated grandeur. He is all there is to this picture, and we are clearly intended to be impressed. The painting has taken on an ironic patina, because Nicolaes Ruts lives on only because of this picture. This, too, is the negative of the environment in pictures by Fabritius and Vermeer. There, we find no claim to fame. Vermeer’s pictures are populated, for the most part, by ordinary people in ordinary rooms. They are not doing anything special. No dancing or carousing — although, in my favorite Vermeer, a lady plays the lute. No ceremony. (I don’t know what it was that attracted Vermeer to his everyday subjects, but it certainly appears to have allowed him to experiment with the representation of reality. The Ruts of the world, I find, are generally impatient with experiments, especially ones that don’t quite come off.) We are not asked to reflect, but only to look. And yet the pictures do not stand still. Our eyes roam their surfaces at the insistent pace of a heartbeat.  It is we who bring the pictures to life, but the artistry gives us no choice.

Donna Tartt’s new novel is unlike the two that precede it; extraordinarily propulsive, it hurtles though a head-spinning (and often heart-breaking) series of incidents. Moral derelictions abound, but redemption is attained on every level. Most of all, our hero achieves adulthood, enjoying a resolution denied to Tartt’s earlier figures. Their dramas, in contrast, were oblique, hinting at more than was revealed. I would argue that Tartt infused the prose of The Secret History and The Little Friend — especially the latter — with the verbal equivalent of a stippled complication that set them vibrating with impalpable significance. The mystery is whether she intended The Goldfinch to demolish, with galloping sentences that intermingle the clichéd and the genuinely novel with reckless unconcern, the hypnotic suspense of a style for which she was so highly admired. It is as though the new book were designed to simulate the munitions explosion that leveled much of the town of Delft later in the year in which Het Puttertje was painted, and which killed its painter — and perhaps its subject as well. But, however extraordinary her plotting, her materials are everyday. With the exception of a dreadful event that seems to shadow a notorious real-life calamity (or two), The Goldfinch is woven from the homeliest stuff of fiction. Its fabric may not be ostentatious, but it drapes beautifully.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013 at 8:52 pm.