Intimacies(26)

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.

I turned back to the canvas, and it occurred to me then that only a woman could have made this image. This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation. That schism, I now realized, was the true inconsistency animating the canvas, and the true object of Leyster’s gaze.

There you are. Startled, I turned. I had been so absorbed in the painting that I had not heard the sound of footfalls in the gallery. Jana stood in front of me. We hadn’t seen each other since we had met for dinner with Adriaan, over a month ago. She had been preoccupied with the exhibition, and although I had sent her several messages I had not heard from her until she called to insist that I attend the opening and the dinner after, her manner charming and blunt as ever. I told her I would be there, I had been missing Jana’s company and wanted to discuss Adriaan with her. Things had gone awry in the past month, and I had felt the shape and meaning of his absence begin to change.

The week had extended to two without explanation or anything more than the briefest of apologies. I was already feeling vulnerable when my disquiet was sharply compounded by another encounter with Kees. Less than a week after my first session with the former president, I was called into another meeting with the defense. The meeting itself passed without incident, but as I left the conference room Kees hurried down the corridor after me. As soon as he reached me he slowed to a walk, an expression of mild surprise on his face, as if he had happened upon me by chance and we had not just spent several hours together. Instinctively, I began walking a little faster. He kept pace beside me until I stopped and turned to face him, exasperated.