Ah, to be in Delft!

I like living here, truly I do. But sometimes, I would rather live in Delft, which was the painter Johannes Vermeer's (1632-1675) hometown.

(Thanks to good ol' wikipedia for the images! Who wouldn't want to live here??)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is having a special exhibit on Vermeer through November 29th. I went this week, which is what started my whole "why don't I live in Delft?" phase, prompted mostly by the fact that en route to the Met there were some scary yelling people on the subway. But then, you look at a Vermeer and you forget about student loans and noisy, angry people and smog. Because this is what you see:

This is The Milkmaid, c. 1657-58 (thanks to Met online for the Vermeer images!), and it is in the United States for the first time since the NY World's Fair of 1939. Holland lent the painting for the 400th Anniversary Henry Hudson celebrations for his "discovery" of NY while working for the Dutch East India Company. It's one of those paintings that you look at and it feels like time stops, and all that matters is you and her, even though French tourists are shoving you in the back. Her headbent concentration as she works is a moment which is forever frozen; a moment which passed long before I was born and will live on long after I die. Thinking about death and life and immortality kind of causes a pain in my side, but regardless: this painting is cool.

The Milkmaid is about the size of Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, (c. 1662) which is in the Met's permanent collection with three other Vermeer paintings. If you want a boring anecdote about me, here it is: this painting is what made me decide to major in art history. I went to the Met for the first time my sophomore year of college, when I was still figuring out what to major in. I loved the art history classes I'd had, but I was also in a particularly wonderful radical-influenced political economy class, and I kept thinking that art history was pretty irrelevant to people who didn't have a place to sleep....what was the point of studying something that wouldn't do much good, anyway? So we went to the Met and I walked by this painting, and that was that. It's small, but it made me feel like the air was being suctioned out of my lungs. I looked and looked and wanted to be there, and talk to her, and see who she was. There is a wonderful stillness, just like The Milkmaid, and you can practically see the dust motes dancing in the Delft sunlight. The wall label at the Met described her as an "idealized beauty treated like a vision," but she seems real enough to me.

Even though I'd like to go to Delft, it might be better to just stick with how I've imagined it. Vermeer eating a hunk of bread and humming while mixing his paints, and contemplating whether he has enough ochre to capture the light. The girl, whoever she was,* cleaning the windows in her crisp white headcloth, while chickens scrabble over the cobblestones outside. And anyway, what if I went and the canals were polluted and the people were surly? That would be terrible. What is NOT terrible, however, is Vermeer. See these paintings in person if you can!

*A book that tries to answer this question is Girl with a Pearl Earring (after the painting of the same name) by Tracy Chevalier. I read it awhile ago, but from what I remember it was good. The book is unsurprisingly better than the movie, although the movie does have Colin Firth as Vermeer, and I would watch Colin Firth read his grocery list. I'm not even kidding.