You make your way through the streets of London, making sure you are not lost yet and know where you are going, finding a way not only from one place to the next but also through the crowds. This is a tourist and commercial place, that's why it's here, and the people who aren't there to be farmed for the cash in their pockets are those that are out to get it. These are still the streets of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair but they are no longer the cartoon mountebanks, charlatans and cutpurses but mostly less colourful, downgraded but nonetheless real, and in your way.You can't really appreciate the architecture or the history you might be walking through because when you need to cross roads, they are nearly as dangerous as the pavement and so you check the cycle lane, the flow of traffic and any traffic lights are just about to change. So, you can get to Trafalgar Square which is forever full of teeming humanity which is why it is a favourite place for street performers and drama students who perform their statue acts in exchange for what I imagine is a lucrative payday, the latest acts being to apparently hang in mid-air held up only by a walking stick. There might be steel drums or a reggae backing track just beyond a violin student doing Bach partita and good luck to them.
In The National Gallery, you still need to pick a path through aimlessly wandering gatherers of cultural highlights, make sure you don't step into anyone absorbed in a Poussin and wait your turn if you want to read about what it is you are looking at. You might not want to see Van Gogh's swirling mental distress, roomsful of portraits of proud C17th dignitaries or all those dark Romantic landscapes of mountains, seas and moonlight. Deep inside the National Gallery is a small room with some also small C17th Dutch paintings by De Hooch, or attributed to Carel Fabritius or by their contemporaries and the greatest of them is Johannes Vermeer van Delft. It is usually quiet in there, the still, calm centre of a busy, noisy city and the serenity comes out of the paintings as much as the fact that not so many find their way this far in. At last, time can wait. It doesn't matter any more. The light comes from one side of the room, and spreads both illumination and shadow across it, and a girl is standing, or indeed sitting at a keyboard instrument. The texture of the fabric of her clothes or the upholstery on the chair are sublime and notice the spectacular detail of the silver tacks against the dark blue on the side of that sensational chair. It's not just that, though, because you know those paintings on the wall and on the virginal are hinting at a narrative and there will be a bit more to it than solitary leisure indoors on a bright, Spring day.
At the exhibition in 2013, Vermeer and Music: the art of Love and Leisure, there were only five Vermeers in the show but on entering the room they were in they immediately stood out. They were perhaps in one's eye-line anyway but they weren't given preferential lighting. Their exceptional radiance is due to a layering of paint (apparently) and the sort of painstaking work that makes the best things special, not least for the knowledge that the artist went to that trouble possibly for your sake.
In the 1990's, the most canvasses that could possibly be brought together from the mere 35, is it, acknowledged Vermeers were as close as The Netherlands and considerable thought was given to going there for the event. It was clearly at least a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity if not one never to be repeated. I didn't go and still sometimes wonder if I should have, the consolation being that I don't really know much about painting (as some might say applies to literature and music, too), I'm just one that 'knows what I like'.
It isn't some version of a New Age cure against tension and distress. I'm not convinced that art alone could prevent neurosis, anxiety or madness but if art plays a significant role in one's life then the very best of it takes on some magnificent status because most of the time one is looking at, listening to or reading things that aren't quite as good. And here is a girl who quite rightly is wondering why someone wants to paint her while she practises her sonata by Sweelinck,
pale and beautiful, at once
balancing calm and distress
as if played by Emma Thompson.
(There is no prize but a special mention could be made of the first person e-mailing in that identifies that misquotation)
Most of Vermeer's paintings are of quiet interiors, one with an artist sitting with his back to the other painter sitting behind him, whose painting we are looking at, and one with a possible reflection of the artist's face, that have the possibility of some self-reference in this most unknowable of artists, about who genuinely almost nothing is known. However, the cheap print that has been on my front room wall for all the 17 years I've been at this address, is the less representative House in Delft that still manages to include a woman indoors doing her needlework and one involved with less glamorous domestic chores but the architecture and brickwork makes a geometric pattern and you glimpse the life inside. It is very ordinary, and immacuately ordinary, somehow a bit like my own modest, terraced house except that not much needlework gets done in here and not many domestic chores either.No, I don't know much about painting. I might be having a look at Whistler shortly having seen something to follow up recently but any list of my favourites would be an incoherent jumble that added up to no meaningful aesthetic but, at its best, not only for the silence (also available in Hammershoi's even quieter interiors, but also sometimes for the movement, the energy and the colour, it can be better than the relative clatter of music or words. But it is the equanimity, the understatement and the radiance that makes Vermeer the greatest painter, and, yes, then there's the torrential power of Maggi Hambling. But that is a different story.