11 July 2026
Went to the National Gallery in the mid-afternoon today—compared to peak hours, it felt like I nearly had the place to myself. Was able to look for a long, slow, uninterrupted time at some works that usually attract obscuring foot traffic. One of those was Vermeer's A Young Woman seated at a Virginal (1670-2), with which I had one of those rare heart rate-increasing, periphery-softening experiences. It unpeeled itself in phases; first, the quality of the light. Unlike A Young Woman standing at a Virginal which is directly adjacent to it on the left, the light isn't flooding in at a diagonal from the top left window in that classic Vermeer move. It's an after-dark scene, the window instead filled with a deep black, the light on the titular woman's face a soft glow coming from the direction of the viewer. It pulled me into an intimate, isolated, private mood (I remember a mental vignetting effect not unlike some adolescent memories of anticipating a novel sexual experience) until the work suddenly loosened like a buckled suitcase popping open. I connected this to Vermeer's deceptively loose and painterly marks—the tiny white pearl and fabric highlights sit high above their bases, of course, but most prominent instance of this looseness for me was the marbling on the virginal. It snakes around and slowly detaches itself from the image the longer you look (thinking of what Jay wrote/said about the gap between the site and the painting—this one widens). As does the sheet music, the decorative design on the woman's chair, and the folds of the woman's blue dress. And there is a dazzling range of blues on display in the picture, which gives it a pool-at-night sort of luminous coolness (and accompanying eroticism) that plays gorgeously off of the warm oranges, yellows, and browns throughout. Lastly, the woman's expression—I'm pretty sure this was suggested in the wall text in some way, but it is the case that Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress hanging on the wall in the background imbues the young woman's coy gaze towards the viewer with an extra dose of seductiveness that becomes more and more endearing, verging on comic. All of this swirls into something that holds a purity of transmission more concentrated than any other work I've experienced in a while. A joie de vivre and an eternal density.