The artifice of their poses was evident, but that did not detract from the intimacy of the paintings—in fact it was the very act of posing, the relationship that act implied, that created this sense of uncanny familiarity. In some cases they were clearly posing for the painter, they gazed into what I thought of as the lens or camera eye, although of course the concept was an anachronism, they would have been gazing not into an apparatus but directly at the painter himself. The idea was almost impossibly personal, and I realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was outside the realm of experience today.
For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.
I moved to the next painting, which depicted a young woman seated beside a table, her face illuminated by the flame from a candle—her broad forehead and rounded cheeks bathed in golden light, the crisp folds of her white blouse almost blinding. The painter’s use of chiaroscuro was particularly striking, at least to my inexpert eye—I could not describe its precise characteristics, I knew only that it was as if the light had been rendered three-dimensional, extending past the frame of the painting, until the canvas itself seemed to be the source of illumination. A man stood behind the young woman, leaning against the table in a pose that was casual and raffish, somehow off-putting, he seemed to infringe upon her personal space, although personal space was not a phrase that could have occurred to the young woman, another anachronism.
I stepped closer to the painting. The young woman—girl, really—was working a piece of embroidery, some small domestic task that seemed of unlikely interest to the young man in his Cossack hat and tunic. He leered down at her, it was obviously not the task but rather the young girl herself who had caught his attention. She was in white, he was in black, the symbolism was clear enough but the exact nature of the encounter was opaque to me. I peered at the title card—the titles of these paintings were usually descriptive and never very poetic, they had none of the forced obscurity of contemporary art titles. The work was called Man Offering Money to a Young Woman.
I looked back at the painting, this time I saw that the man appeared to be holding coins in the palm of his cupped hand. The palm was discreetly proffered, with the other hand he was gently pulling at her arm, as if to turn her away from her work and toward the proposition before her. I saw the uncommon skill with which the artist had communicated the subtleties of force and resistance—the drama in the pull of his hand on her arm, the stiffness of her posture, the fearful widening of the eyes.
But the true tension in the painting lay not in the perfect consistency with which that moment of contact had been rendered, but rather in the inconsistency at the heart of the image. No matter how long I stared at the painting, I could not reconcile the perfect modesty of the young woman, whose entire body was covered apart from her face and hands, with the lascivious manner and offer being made by the man. Perhaps he was simply offering to purchase the embroidered cloth? But if so, then why the expression of fear on the young woman’s face? Why the young woman’s concentration, so brittle and freighted with meaning, as if it were the only rebuff she was permitted to make?
I looked at the title card again, to my surprise I saw that the painting had been made by a woman, Judith Leyster. I had never heard of her, but I knew it was unusual for a woman to achieve recognition during the Golden Age, even now it was rare for a female painter to reach the stature of her male colleagues. According to the card, Leyster was born in 1609. The painting was dated 1631: she was only twenty-two years old when she had made it. It seemed miraculous that the painting had been made by someone in her very early twenties, it was not only the technical skill that was striking—but that was also extraordinary, to achieve that level of mastery at such a young age—it was the ambiguity of the image itself.