Skip to main content

Johannes Vermeer, The Procuress (1656)






The painting, The Procuress (1656), has long been suspected to be atypical of Johannes Vermeer’s painterly style and characteristics: the airiness the painter often favoured gives way to a more limited space and its light treatment, except a more prominent one on the carpet, is confusedly rudimentary, as if the whole canvas was emerging from a film of smoke and sands. Depicted here a brothel scene, but any feelings of seediness or raucousness are diluted, presumably for the sake of decency, which is an undercurrent flows beneath Vermeer’s oeuvre, attests to the Dutch master’s contemporary role as an unsung genius.



What is peculiar about this painting is the man on the left, long rumoured to be the self-portrait of the painter, who is seen staring casually into the viewers. The glance is a conspiratorial one, seemingly in complicity with the beholders. This imposed intimacy generates an unnerving effect; unconsciously the viewers do find themselves return the uncanny glance, in hope of plumbing any illicit secrets. Conspiratorial glances are not too rarely found in paintings. In Edouard Manet’s ubiquitous Luncheon on the Grass (1862-3), the nude model turns her gaze boldly to the front, assuming admirable confidence and ease when mingling with two well-attired gentlemen. What abhorred the viewers of the 19th century was not the subject of nudity, but the juxtaposition of formality and facetiousness, and moreover, the unflappable gaze that speaks of her liberation from the fetters of social protocols, and her assertion as a woman with independence: she who makes her own choices; she who is unafraid of parading her womanly attributes.



The conspiratorial glances sometimes question us, of the things that we are squeamish to face, and the answers we dread to give. A murkier instance can be seen in Hieronymus Bosch’s Haywain Triptych (1500-2). On its right panel, where all human sins run amok, stands a bull in the midst of the hellish commotion. Despite the hectoring of the infernal beings the bull halts before the gate to Hell, hesitant to be led to its final damnation and instead, prefers to let its emotion flow. It is especially an agony when amid a crowd of senseless violence and vices an innocent and sentient being still subsists. The pitiable creature turns its gaze at us, its meekness still fills its eyes, seemingly to implore our sympathy and mercy. This is the moment when all words muted on our mouths.

Eyes can disclose unwittingly the secrets that are best to be hidden, but they can also be observant, furtively and steadily discovering the secrets of others. Therefore my eyes instinctively dwell on the second man from left in our painting. Something about the couple on his right obviously interests the man. A smile of wiles and malice plays upon his mouth, and our eyes, despite how keenly and closely we scrutinize the painting we fail to tease out the possible hidden agenda of the smiling man and what is actually happening in this painting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke
1 comment
Read more

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are
Post a Comment
Read more