9 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 long and uninterrupted 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 revealed itself in phases; first, the quality of the light. Unlike A Young Woman standing at a Virginal directly adjacent to it on the left, the light isn't flooding in at a diagonal from the window in that classic Vermeer way. It's an after-dark scene, the window at the top left of the composition filled with a deep black, the light on the titular woman's face a soft glow coming from the direction of the viewer. A private, vignetting mood.
The next part was when the work suddenly loosened, like a buckled suitcase popped open. This was due to his painterly marks—the tiny white pearl and fabric highlights, of course, but most prominently the marbling on the virginal. It snakes around and slowly detaches itself from the image over time (thinking of what Jay wrote/said about the gap between the site and the painting). As does the sheet music, the decorative design on the woman's chair, and the folds of the woman's blue dress; there is a dazzling range of blues on display in the picture, which gives it a pool-at-night coolness (and an eroticism) that plays gorgeously off of the warm oranges, yellows, and browns throughout.
Then the woman's expression—I'm pretty sure this was suggested in the wall text, but it is the case that Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress on the wall in the background imbues her gaze at the viewer with an extra dose of almost comic seductiveness. All of this swirls into a purity of transmission, a joie de vivre, and an eternal density.