The background of this header is built from the upper sections of two paintings by Johannes Vermeer, “Soldier with a Laughing Woman” and “Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window.” Across the middle the headline says, “Vermeer’s Zones of Peace.” See Credits below.
Vermeer’s Zones of Peace

Vermeer’s Zones of Peace

Our present day is full of turbulence. But of course there’s nothing new in the world. I think we all might do better if we had our own zones of peace to retreat into from time to time. Don’t you? 

Sometimes-strident political divides bedevil our lives and our doomscrolls. Our neighbors, and often we ourselves, live in terror of masked swarms of federal enforcers who sweep in to grab up immigrant and citizen alike, no questions allowed. Our nation’s leaders have dragged us unwillingly into an ill-planned war and an economic crisis. Environmental concerns and medical science have been cast aside like unfashionable rags of no importance.

Scary times, for sure. Turbulent, chaotic, and deeply dystopian, to my mind. But such disruptions certainly are not unique to our age alone. This post was inspired by a New Yorker article from 1995, republished in their newsletter as a “New Yorker Classic.” Titled Inventing Peace by Lawrence Weschler, it reflected on insights gleaned from Antonio Cassese, a wise judge who’d been empaneled at The Hague for the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal.

This design focuses on the painting “Officer with a Laughing Woman,” 1657, Johannes Vermeer. A man in a dark red jacket and a wide-brimmed hat sits at a table by an open, leaded-glass window. At right angles to him a woman in a white head covering and a gold-and-black dress holds a fluted glass and smiles at him. Behind them on the wall is a large map.
“Officer with a Laughing Woman,” 1657, Johannes Vermeer. See Credits below.

Finding a Zone of Peace in an Art Museum

Much of the article focused on Cassese’s preferred refuge at the nearby Mauritshuis, an art museum in the Hague. There, he would “spend a little time with the Vermeers.” Weschler understood what Cassese found in the paintings. In his New Yorker article he reflected on the time period when Johannes Vermeer (AKA Jan) lived and worked, and all of the horrors abroad in the land at the time.

What he rediscovered in them was “themes that are saturatingly present but only as felt absence” (Weschler’s emphasis). For Vermeer, and for his viewers, the scenes he portrayed are what we might call “zones of peace” in a world embroiled in war.

“I began to realize that, in fact, the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about,” Weschler wrote. “Of course, not directly.” He points out the small touches that signal to the knowing viewer. “That’s what the roaring lions carved into the chair posts are all about—those and also the maps on the wall.”

This design focuses on the painting “Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” c. 1657-1659, Johannes Vermeer. A pregnant woman stands by an open, leaded-glass window with a red curtain draped over the top of it. She’s almost read a letter all the way to the bottom. A table with a red, blue, and yellow covering and a bowl of fruit stands in the foreground . On the wall we see a large depiction of Cupid with a bow that is partially obscured by a pale yellow-green drapery on the right.
“Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” c. 1657-1659, Johannes Vermeer. See Credits below.

The Violence Just Out of Frame

“When soldiers visit young girls in Vermeer’s paintings, where does one think they have been off soldiering?” Weschler asks. “When pregnant young women are standing still, bathed in the window light, intently reading their letters, where is one invited to imagine the letters are coming from?”

He further invites us to “consider the magisterial ‘View of Delft’ . . . It is an image of unalloyed civic peace and quiet. But it is also the image of a town only just emerging from a downpour, . . . a shaft of fresh, clean light gets lavished on one spire in particular, that of the radiantly blond Nieuwe Kerk, in whose interior, as any contemporary of Vermeer’s would doubtless have known, stands the mausoleum of William the Silent, one of the heroes of the wars of Dutch independence, assassinated in Delft at the end of the previous century by a French Catholic fanatic.”

Violence, then as all too often today, lurked just out of frame. As Weschler puts it, “at a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history of his continent, [Vermeer] had been finding—and, yes, inventing—a zone filled with peace, a small room, an intimate vision . . . and then breathing it out.”

This design centers on a broad cityscape painting “View of Delft,” c. 1659-1661, Johannes Vermeer. Red blue roofs rise behind a seawall at the left. In the center the wall opens on a port section with landing spaces and several ships. Beyond the harbor stand larger municipal buildings and a church with a white spire. The viewer sees this vista from across a canal with calm water and a wide, tan beach. We see several people and a boat on this side near the water. Above the city, storm clouds recede, replaced by puffy white clouds and patches of blue sky.
“View of Delft,” c. 1659-1661, Johannes Vermeer. See Credits below.

Transcending the Easy Expectations

Many of Vermeer’s paintings have been described as “instances of the various types of moralizing genre imagery then current in the Netherlands.” But they transcend the easy expectations of convention. Wechsler argues that instead Vermeer used the tropes to then stand them on their heads. The artist’s subjects, particularly the women, are not symbolic allegories. Instead, each is “a unique individual human being, worthy of our own unique individual response.”

As a writer, I know that “invert the tropes” is advice all artists (whatever their medium) can use to add depth and nuance to their work, although when overused it’s a trope of its own. Ideally, those who receive and react to the work can grasp the subtext. The clues are there, for the perceptive. But it helps to recognize commonly-held understandings.

Those contemporary residents of Delft could grasp the emphasis on the illuminated church much more easily than we can today. They probably had a much more visceral reaction, too. But even in this distant period centuries later, the work can still touch us in a special way. And each time we come back to the painting it’s a chance to see new nuances. Sometimes we even find new zones of peace.

This design focuses on the painting “Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid,” c. 1670-1671, Johannes Vermeer. In light from a closed, leaded-glass window, a woman sits at a table draped with a red, black, and gold patterned tablecloth. She focuses on a letter she is writing. Behind her, a woman dressed mostly in brown looks out the window with a pensive expression. On the wall in shadow hangs a painting of a family grouped around a woman holding a baby.
“Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid,” c. 1670-1671, Johannes Vermeer. See Credits below.

Spend a Moment in Vermeer’s Zones of Peace

I used Wechsler’s article as an excuse (as if anybody needed one) to return to Vermeer’s work myself. I first encountered it through reproductions in books. I was a child fortunate enough to have a mother who was an art teacher, so they weren’t hard to find. It was love at first sight. And each time I have come back to them, I’ve found something different, something deeper.

Masterpieces are like that. So is human development, from childhood through the maturation of cognition and the accumulation of experience. With every repeated viewing, we bring more insights (as long as we continue to grow and learn). And each time, the masterwork has more riches to reveal to us.

Just as I’ve shared two Vermeer compositions featuring letters, please consider this post as a sort of letter to you. It’s an invitation to linger for a few moments in your own added insights  – and to rest for a while in Vermeer’s zones of peace.

About the Author

Jan S. Gephardt is both an artist and a novelist. She is best known as the author of the science fiction mystery “XK9 saga.” These books tell the stories of a pack of uplifted police dogs who live on a space station and solve crimes (among other things).

Her most recent published novel in the series is Bone of Contention. It completes a trilogy, now also available as The Complete XK9 “Bones” Trilogy Omnibus Edition. She’s currently grinding through revisions for her next XK9 book, Bones for the Children.

Jan hasn’t given up art, of course. She also is the Chief Cat-Herder and Art Director for Weird Sisters Publishing. And she still creates fine art paper sculpture whenever she can steal the time to do so.

IMAGE CREDITS

Many thanks to Wikimedia for all of the paintings used in this post. Here they are, in order of use. “Officer with a laughing Woman,” By Johannes Vermeer – Google Arts & Culture — BAGeJEKy9TZJog, Public Domain. “Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” By Johannes Vermeer – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, online collection, Public Domain. “View of Delft,” By Johannes Vermeer – www.mauritshuis.nl : Home : Info : : Image, Public Domain. And finally, “Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.” By Johannes Vermeer – Derived from National Gallery of Ireland, Public Domain. I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did!

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