NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION (_Continued_)
In _The Sower_, by Millet, we found that, though the composition was
naturalistic, it was based upon the classic principle of rhythm of line.
We shall not discover this principle in the present picture of a _Young
Woman Opening a Window_. The arrangement of the figure and its
surroundings is simply natural.
The picture is by Johannes Vermeer[5] of Delft, so called because this
town in Holland was his birthplace and the scene of his life’s work.
Born in 1632, he is one of those famous Dutch artists of the Seventeenth
Century, of whom I have already spoken. We were talking of landscape
painting and mentioned that in this century the art branched out in two
directions. Landscape up to that time having been used as a background
for figures, became then an independent art, cultivated for its own
sake; and the artists treated it in two ways. On the one hand, some
applied the principles of geometric composition to an artificial
building up of bits of nature into what is called the formal, or classic
landscape; while other painters represented the natural landscape
naturally. These latter were the Dutchmen, who treated figures also in
the same realistic spirit. That is to say, whether they painted
portraits or figure pictures or landscapes, their aim was to represent
the actual subject as they really saw it. They did not substitute an
artificial arrangement for the natural appearance of people and things;
nor did they try to obtain beauty by altering and improving upon nature.
Their motive or purpose was to render the beauty that is actually in
nature. So, for the most part, they chose subjects of familiar every day
life.
This picture, for example, represents simply a glimpse of home life, of
a Dutch girl in well-to-do circumstances. Perhaps the artist intended to
make a portrait of her; probably his intention was only to paint a genre
picture, that is to say, an incident of every day life. Not so much,
however, for the sake of representing the incident, as of making it
contribute to a subject of abstract beauty. How he has done this I hope
we shall see presently. Meanwhile, I want you to grasp the distinction
between simply representing an incident, as you or I might have seen it,
if we had been present, and Vermeer’s motive of using the incident as a
peg on which to hang some beauty of light and color and texture. I mean,
it was the beauty of light and color and texture that made him pleased
to paint this picture; and probably he would have been just as pleased
if some other girl had been standing there, or some other objects had
been spread upon the table.
Perhaps a familiar example will illustrate this distinction. Two people
start off for an afternoon’s walk. One sets out because he wishes to
call upon a friend who lives on the other side of the wood. To pay this
call is the object of his walk; for the friend is building a new house.
As he walks along he is busy wondering how far it is advanced, whether
the plasterers have finished their work; and as he returns home he is
thinking about the house he has seen and how he himself, when he builds
a house of his own, will plan it differently. In fact, the incident of
his friend’s being engaged in building is what interests him, and has
been throughout the afternoon the motive of his walk. His companion, on
the other hand, agrees to go along with him, not so much because he is
interested in the house, although he is to some extent, but mostly
because he loves a walk. He enjoys the exhilaration of the exercise; he
is fond of the wood through which they have to pass. He will have a
chance to hunt for the first signs of spring--the early skunk-cabbage,
the shy peep of the violet through the dead leaves underfoot, the rose
blush of the maples overhead, the piping and flicker of the first
bird-arrivals and so on. The real motive of his walk is the joy of
exercise and of the beauties met with on the way. Visiting the house was
but an excuse.
There is the same distinction among painters. To some the representation
of the incident is the main thing; to others, the rendering of the
beauties which it involves. Vermeer, like the other Dutch artists, of
the Seventeenth Century, belonged to the latter
[Illustration: Young Woman Opening a Window. _Johannes Vermeer._
(_Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art._)]
class. Since, however, his subject is the peg on which he hangs his
arrangement of light and color, let us begin by examining it.
A young woman is standing between a table and a window. With one hand
she opens the casement while the other grasps the handle of a brass
pitcher that stands in an ewer of the same material. Perhaps she is
going to water some flowers that are outside on the window sill. Her
costume consists of a dark blue skirt, buff-colored bodice, and a broad
collar and hood-like cap of thin white linen. The table is covered with
an oriental cloth, on which is a yellow jewel case, while over the blue
chair lies a cloak of lighter blue. On the gray wall hangs a map. This
and the table cloth may remind us, that the Dutch of that period,
although they were fighting for their political liberty against Spain,
found means to build ships and carry on trade across the sea with far
distant countries. Possibly the girl was the daughter of some
sea-captain or prosperous merchant.
Anyhow the picture, beside being a beautiful painting, is very
interesting to us to-day as an illustration of the domestic life of a
Dutch girl of some two hundred and fifty years ago. And the same
interest belongs to all the old genre pictures. They make the past still
alive to our eyes; just as the genre pictures painted to-day will show
some future generation how we lived. But this, I repeat, was not
Vermeer’s first thought. On the other hand, I do not wish you to think
that he was not himself interested in the subject of his picture. He
was, I am sure; but in another way. He, no doubt, arranged the figure
with great care and carefully selected and grouped the surrounding
objects. But, in placing the girl, he did not try to get the graceful
lines that Raphael, for example, would have imagined. Vermeer’s desire
was to keep the pose and gesture natural. In this he was simply
following the general motive of the artists of his country and of that
time. But his own particular motive in representing the girl in the act
of opening the window was that the clear outside light might stream in
at the back of her figure and blend with the dimmer light of the
interior.
I said that we would study the kind of beauty that this picture
possesses; and it is to be found in the rendering of the light. The
Italians, busy with their grand classic compositions, would not have
thought of this. Their motive was the beauty of form, arrayed in
beautiful draperies, and so arranged that the figures should produce
beautiful patterns of line and form. To make a motive of the beauty of
natural light was a discovery of the Dutch.
They were artists, you see, and therefore in love with beauty. But they
confined themselves, almost entirely, to real subjects of every day
life, and accordingly had to find out the beauty that may be in these
familiar things. And it was not long before they learned how much the
beauty of things depends upon the light in which they are seen.
Before we go any further in our study of the picture, let us see if we
cannot be sure of this from our own experience. Whether you live in a
city or in the country, how differently you feel when you start out in
the morning, according as the day is fine or not. Under a bright sky
everything takes on a cheerfulness that is communicated to our own
spirit. Let the sky become downcast and the appearance of objects
becomes dulled. Often too, some familiar object that we have passed time
and time again without particular notice, suddenly attracts us. How
beautiful! we exclaim. If we try to discover the reason of the beauty,
we shall find very likely, that it is due to some effect of light. It
need not be a bright light, on the contrary, it may be a soft light,
such as wraps itself around objects like a gauzy veil, when the sky is
thick with vapor. Do you remember that line of Tennyson’s--“Waves of
light went over the wheat”? He had been watching a field of wheat,
spread out smoothly like a pale golden carpet in the yellow sunshine.
Suddenly, a soft breeze passes over it, and as the stems bend their
heavy heads of grain, and recover themselves, ripples of light travel
across the field. The poet notes it in his memory, for a future poem.
So, if we use our eyes, we may note countless examples of the beauty
which is added to the simplest things by light. In fact, the changing
effect of light will correspond to the changing expressions that pass
over the human face.
The Dutch artists, as soon as they became really interested in the
nature and life around them, quickly recognised this fact, and made it
the chief motive of their pictures. They were no longer satisfied with
mere realism; that is to say, to make the figure and the objects around
it look as real in the pictures as they did in actual reality. They
sought to render the expression of which these objects were capable,
under the influence of light. If you do not understand this I think you
will, if you place a bunch of flowers in some dark corner of the room,
look at it a little while, and then move it to the window. Now, as the
light falls upon the flowers and shines through the petals, the whole
bunch is transfigured. It has taken on a new appearance of beauty. Like
a face that has suddenly lighted up with an expression of happiness, the
flowers seem alive with radiance. They too, have their expression and it
will change with the changing of light. For look at them again toward
evening, when the light is low, and their faces, not less beautiful,
will show a quite different expression.
Now the light which streamed in at that window in Delft, when Vermeer
painted this picture, was a very cool, pure light; one would say, from
seeing the original picture, a morning light in Spring, it is so pure
and fresh and fragrant. Yes, one can even feel the fragrance of its
freshness, so exquisitely has the artist suggested to us the impression
of the lighted air that steals into the room, filling it with purity.
See, how it bathes the wall; even the bare gray becomes radiant; how it
gleams on the girl’s shoulder, and filters through her cap, making it
in parts transparent, so that one sees the background color through it.
Note also, how it roams among the objects in the room, caressing the
under part of the girl’s right arm, bringing out the softness and
plumpness of her left wrist; splashing the ewer and touching the
pitcher, the table cloth, and other details with glints of sparkle, like
notes of gladness in a melody of tender freshness.
Even in the reproduction one can feel the freshness that pervades the
room, and the delicate quality of the lighted atmosphere that envelopes
the figures and fills every part of the scene. I mean, that not only is
this effect of light visible to our eyes, but it also stirs in us a
sentiment or feeling of gladness and refreshment. Still more will the
original, if you have a chance of seeing it in the Metropolitan Museum,
New York, where, though a very small picture, it is one of the gems of
the collection. For there you will feel also the effect of the color,
yellow, gray, and various hues of blue. They are all cool colors, the
blues especially, and very pure in hue, which increases the sensation of
freshness.
A moment ago I spoke of the picture as being like a melody. It will
suggest to some imaginations the blitheness of a spring-song. The fact
that a painting may sometimes seem to have the tunefulness or harmony of
music I have already mentioned in a previous chapter. The reason is that
painting and music, although different arts, have certain elements in
common. Later on, when we shall speak of color, I shall try to suggest
to you the correspondence between sound notes in music and color notes
in painting. But for the present I will remind you of an element, common
to both arts, of which we have already spoken--rhythm. In Raphael’s
_Jurisprudence_, I pointed out to you the rhythm of movement in the
figures. It flows through the forms of the figures in rippling,
wave-like lines of direction. But nothing of that sort is apparent in
Vermeer’s picture. There are repetitions and contrasts in the
arrangement of the full and empty spaces; but they represent rather a
pattern of spots; we are not conscious of any rhythm of line. Then, in
what does the rhythm consist?
If you think of that line of Tennyson’s--“Waves of light went over the
wheat,” you may perhaps discover for yourselves the kind of rhythm in
this picture. To give you time to think it out, before I tell you, let
me ask you, if you have noticed that in a flower-bed in the garden a
number of blossoms of different colors will “dwell together in unity,”
but if you pick some of these and bring them indoors and begin to
arrange them in a vase, the colors will seem to clash. That they do not
appear to clash in the flower bed is because the out-of-door light
envelopes everything, soothes the violence of the colors and brings them
all into an appearance of harmony. Similarly in this picture, the light
streaming through the window brings all the different spots of color
into a single harmony of effect. They are no longer separate and
independent, but drawn together and united by the veil of lighted
atmosphere. Of this again, we will speak when we reach the subject of
color.
But the rhythm of this picture, in what does it consist? Yes, in the
movement, not of form, but of light. Uniting all the colors into a
single harmony, it flows in and out through the lighter and darker parts
of the composition; sometimes in a broad sweeping flood, as on the wall;
sometimes in little pulses of movement, as it leaps from point to point;
now losing itself in the hollow of a shadow, then reappearing in the
gleam of a fold; all the while streaming through the picture in a
continuous ebb and flow. In fact, as we study it, we gradually find that
the light does for the parts of this composition what the lines of
direction did in Raphael’s--it unites them in a rhythmic movement.
Do not be disturbed, if at first reading these words convey little
meaning to you; or if at first sight you do not feel the rhythm of the
composition. It is there, however, and some day, if you are really going
to be a student of pictures, you will feel it yourself.
For the present, if you will accept my word for it, I wish you to
understand that this rhythmic effect of out-of-door light represented a
new motive in painting. The Italians of the great period did not see it.
It was the discovery of the Dutch realists, those artists of Holland in
the Seventeenth Century, whose study was the real appearances of nature
and life.[6] Their pictures were not as grand as the Italians’; for
they were small in size, and were not built up on the magnificently
formal plan that gives such a dignity and distinction to the Italian
pictures. Nor are their subjects so heroic and impressive. They
represent only the facts of every day life. Yet they have a great beauty
of their own, because they rely on the inexhaustible beauty of light.
It is on this same beauty that after two hundred years artists of our
own day are relying. They have gone back to the example of Vermeer and
the other Dutch artists, and are applying it to the study of similar
subjects. They are painting nature as it shows itself to them in its
envelope of lighted atmosphere.