Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
shhh...dutch Art
You're sitting at home late one night, and it's perfectly calm.
Not a sound, very peaceful. And then...the refrigerator motor
turns off, and it's really quiet.
Dutch art is really quiet art. It silences our busy world,
so that every sound, every motion is noticeable. You can hear
cows tearing off grass 50 yards
away. Dutch art is still. It slows our
fast-lane world, so we notice the
motion of birds. We notice how the
cold night air makes the stars sharp.
We notice that the undersides of
leaves and cats are always a lighter
shade than the tops. Dutch art stills
the world so we can hear our own
heartbeat and reflect upon that
most noble muscle that, without thinking, gives us life.
To see how subtle Dutch art is, realize that one of the
museum's most exciting, dramatic, emotional, and extrava-
gant Dutch paintings is probably
The Threatened Swan
(in
Room 8). It's quite a contrast to the rape scenes and visions
of heaven of Italian Baroque paintings from the same time
period.
Vermeer—
The Kitchen Maid
(c. 1658)
It's so quiet...you can practically hear the milk pouring into the
bowl.
Vermeer brings out the beauty in everyday things. The sub-
ject is ordinary—a kitchen maid—but you could look for hours
at the tiny details and rich color
tones. These are everyday objects,
but they glow in a diffused light:
the crunchy crust, the hanging bas-
ket, even the rusty nail in the wall
with its tiny shadow. Vermeer had a
unique ability with surface texture,
to show how things feel when you
touch them.
The maid is alive with Ver-
meer's distinctive yellow and blue—
the colors of many traditional Dutch
homes—against a white backdrop.
She is content, solid, and sturdy, performing this simple task as if
it's the most important thing in the world. Her full arms are built
with patches of reflected light. Vermeer squares of a little world in
itself (framed by the table in the foreground, the wall in back, the
