by Larry WithamFrom Vermeer to Rembrandt, Small Dutch Artworks Set the Tone
DUTCH PAINTINGS HAVE always been a good centerpiece for novels. The Dutch style has its allure, and the smallish size of many Dutch works makes them convenient objects for human intrigues—such as personal contemplation or theft.
In the real
world, a few small Rembrandt paintings hold the record for art thefts,
somewhere around eighty. But for fiction, any kind of Dutch paintings will do.
They just have that certain quality.
The allure
began with Frenchman Honoré de Balzac. His was a time when Dutch landscape and
genre painting was making its way into France. These detailed paintings of
ordinary life—versus large paintings about history, politics, and
heroes—fascinated a detail-telling artist such as Balzac. So he frequently injected
Dutch artworks into his story plots.
Best known
is the 1830 short novel, At the Sign of
the Cat and Racket (La Maison du
chat-qui-pelote). A young artist returns from Italy. He comes upon the “cat
and racket” shop, and there envisions a genre scene, which Balzac portrays in the Dutch style. The artist paints the scene in that new manner and it revolutionizes
the Paris Salon. The artist also sees a young maiden, the shop owner’s
daughter, in the window. He captures her image exquisitely in what might also be
called a portrait in the Dutch manner.
They marry,
and as the painter is drawn more to his wife’s portrait than to her, and as she
feels more and more inadequate next to the ideal of the portrait, their
marriage breaks down. The artists wants to live in the world of the artistic ideal,
with all its freedom. His wife represents the shackles to humdrum life on
earth. Besides such melodrama, Balzac is clearly influenced by Dutch painters’
attention to everyday detail—a hallmark of his own novelistic style.
Pulitzer-winning novelist Donna Tartt has also chosen a small Dutch painting as a
scaffold for her very long novel, The Goldfinch (2013). The choice is not necessarily integral to the characters or the plot. Except
that the young hero in this coming-of-age story—Theo Decker—can end up in
Amsterdam for a gun battle with European gangsters to recover the Dutch artwork. In
Amsterdam, with its lenient drug laws, Theo can also feed his drug habit, which
is a key feature in the character’s story.
The Goldfinch (a real artwork) was
painted by the little-known Dutchman Carel Fabritius in 1654. Of the Dutch
painters, otherwise, Rembrandt and Vermeer seem the obvious favorites of
novelists.
Either
artist can certainly swing a book cover, as proved by spy-thriller novelist
Daniel Silva’s The Rembrandt Affair.
Silva’s plotting around Gabriel Allon, a tough and cagey former Mosad agent who
is also an art restorer, often evokes the plight of European Jews. In this
case, they were owners of art taken by the Nazis. This Rembrandt was owned by a
Jewish woman, but later came into the illicit possession of a Swiss banker who
made his fortune on the back of the Holocaust.
The woman
slipped a list of stolen art and treasure into the lining of Rembrandt painting.
The list is also an indictment of guilty parties. For this reason, the painting
becomes an object of pursuit by the good guys and the bad. In the end, Allon
recovers the list. The painting is given justice. The Swiss banker is foiled,
but he is so high up in the system, he is beyond punishment for the time being.
Most
literal of all is British novelist Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), which tells the fictional love story of
Vermeer with the young woman, a house servant girl, who was the subject of his
famous portrait in blues, yellows, browns, whites, and flesh tones, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665).
So little
is known of Vermeer’s private life that Chevalier has had to mine her powers of
invention. The sexual tension between Vermeer and the attractive
sixteen-year-old Griet is the obviously story line, but Chevalier also
introduces a modern-day controversy into her plot.
It has been
argued in modern times that Vermeer’s renderings were so well done because he used a camera
obscura to trace the scenes before he painted them, a kind of “cheating,” you
might say (like using an overhead project today, a favorite method of Andy
Warhol, for example). The evidence in Vermeer’s work is the curved perspectives of
his paintings and the blurry highlights that cameras produce. As Griet said in
the novel, “They set up the camera obscura so it pointed at me.”
The debate
continues in fiction, however.
When
Katherine Weber decided to create a fictional Vermeer painting for her plot in
the elegant novel, The Music Lesson (1998),
her main character, Patrician Dolan, argues that Vermeer didn’t need a camera obscura
to simply draw very well; it’s done all the time by talented art students, after all.
The central
theme, however, is how a Dutch painting can overwhelm the heart and senses.
This painting—a fictional “music lesson” by Vermeer—mesmerizes Dolan during her long isolated stay in the Irish backcountry
after the painting was stolen by an IRA splinter group.
Author Weber knows her art history,
and the Irish landscape. Vermeers had been stolen before, one by the IRA
from the stately Russborough House in England (Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid, now recovered), and one from
the Isabelle Steward Gardner Museum in Boston (The Concert, still missing, with speculations on IRA
involvement).
This novel, a kind of diary of past events,
opens with: “She’s beautiful. Surely, there is nothing more interesting to look
at in all the world, nothing, than the human face. Her gaze catches me, pins me
down, pulls me in.” There is more such exaltation, and we don’t learn the
portrait painting is a Vermeer until halfway through the book.
As girl in Boston, fictional Dolan
had been enchanted by a Vermeer at the Gardner Museum. So later, as an art
historian, she was brushed-up on the painter. Indeed, an agent from the IRA splinter group duped her into identifying a Vermeer worthy of theft for the Irish
cause. It is a political cause deep in Dolan’s family background, but one she's been sucked into only now, a time of loneliness, making her a party to
high crime and unexpected violence.
She now calls herself a “naïve idiot”
for not seeing all the betrayal. But the painting’s spell over her did not lend
to seeing hard, cold reality. For an hour or so, on the eve of the crime, an
airport heist in Holland, “I just sat with the simple painted panel in my two
hands, and I looked and I looked and I looked. And anything that might happen
to me when this is over, however it ends, will be worth that hour.”
As long as there is fiction, we're likely to find its profitable use of Dutch painting.
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