Jacob Vrel: Woman At A Window

[poliphilo]

 This has to be one of the strangest, most haunting images in Dutch art. It was the revelation of the Fitzwilliam's 2011-12  exhibition Vermeer's Women. Who or what is the child at the window? Dutch genre pictures generally explain themselves through symbol- a lap dog means fidelity- a cast shoe means abandoned virtue- but there's none of that here....

Comments

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

It appears to me that she has lost a child. I can't tell what that is on the floor, but it appears to be a crumpled handkerchief. The room is otherwise empty, except for her and her off-balance chair. I would say this woman is experiencing what we in Pastoral Care call "complicated grief". The child maybe has been gone for years, but the loss of him still affects her every single day.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

The dead peer in at windows; the glass will not break. (Not yet: this isn't Bronte.)

The crumpled twisted scrap, I've read, is paper, with a signature.

Nine

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

*shivers*

Thank you - I'd never come across that before. It's wonderful. And very unsettling...

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Fascinating

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wow. How very atypical. The fact that it's obviously at night, and the child (?) is out in the darkness makes me think it is, indeed, meant to be symbolic of a dead child and the stark desolation and emptiness in the house that is left. The chair off balance is a very compelling touch, too --adding a discordant angle among the rigid symmetries and making the posture of the woman seem so much more urgent, and full of motion. Weird, spooky painting that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Or could the child outside be her remembered self, or a child she never had or- even- mundanely- an actual child. I love how it doesn't explain itself.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's unlike anything else I can think of from the period

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Vrel is a rare artist. All his paintings of interiors have something of the same brooding quality but this is definitely the strangest.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the introduction! I'd not knowingly seen any of Vrel's work before. Seems he's something of an enigma.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I like this very much...it gives me the shivers. A child at the window in the night...quite ghostly.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

How sad and strange an image! I had never heard of Vrel before.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Neither had I. He didn't leave many paintings behind. He may well have been an amateur.

[chochiyo-sama.livejournal.com]

My first thought was also that this was the innocent wraith of her former self, come to haunt the harried husk of her current self. But then, I thought of that stanza from the poem: For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Instantly my brain started spinning a story of a girl on the cusp of womanhood who loved a boy on the cusp of manhood. Love blooms. Her father disapproves and forbids. A note from the boy urges her to meet him at the end of the lane--he has a plan. They can sail off to the colonies. They will marry and make their own way in the world.

For whatever reason, fear or obedience or uncertainty, she doesn't go. But she carries the note declaring his eternal love in her pocket all these long years. Now she is an old maid, still living in her father's house, though now her oldest brother is the master for such is the way things operated in those days. Perhaps she read the obituary of her former love in the local paper. That's why his long-ago love letter now lays crumpled on the floor.

As she stares out at the dark night, the specter of the child they might have had appears at the window. She could have had so many things--love, a home, children, joy, laughter. Instead she has a solitary chair in a begrudged garrett and a cold, lonely, empty existence.

Or, it might have been gas or a bit of underdone potato.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a poignant story.

This is the beauty of the painting. It's full of potential stories and no-one knows which one the painter had in mind. Perhaps all of them flitted through his consciousness.