Head of a Young Girl

Vermeer’s exploration of certain subtleties of human feeling is perhaps without equal.  I have chosen his Head of a Young Girl, as a subject for analysis because his expression of feelings is interwoven with his acute optical concerns, as well as correlations to seventeenth-century notions of time.  While in the Mauritshuis, I moved aside to let a man in his thirties with a sleeping baby on his back get a close look at the portrait.  He stood not taking his eyes off the painting, for more than twenty minutes.  Before turning to leave the painting he blew a kiss.  I took this gesture as a sign of his pleasure and respect.  He may have felt some of the feelings described by Edward Snow, which give something of the density of feeling richness of thought that are communicated by this single small portrait:

It is always the beauty of this portrait head –its purity, freshness, radiance, sensuality – that is singled out for comment…The experience of Head of a Young Girl, for all its sensuousness and singleness of impact, is one of unresolved, almost viscerally enforced contradictions.  As intimate mirroring that is also a painful, disturbing estrangement.  An all engulfing (yet patient, gentle) yearning composed equally of desire and renunciation.

Yet everything that cuts so quickly is at the same time softened, eased, on the threshold of a strangely sensual letting-go.  A startled expression mingles pain, apprehension, and bewilderment (it might almost have been wonder), dissolves, in virtually the same moment it registers, into a wistful, languishing, seductively acceptant look of comprehension and relinquishment.

Head of a Young Girl is the rarest of masterpieces in expressing immanent action, complex and yet determinate feelings of subtlety and strength, an da sense of optical accuracy.

The head, seen against a background of deep yet flat, black space, is treated with a subtle flatness and selected omissions (notice the suppressed nose and missing eyebrows) that act to isolate vivid details such as the eyes and lips.  The effect allows for a more powerful expression of the information imparted by these details – something like the isolation and power of the details in Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar.

The best color photograph of Head of a Young Girl cannot prepare the viewer for the impact of the original.  The face color was constructed as if part of the finest Impressionist painting ever made.  A thousand tiny dots of ever so slightly varied color fuse to lead the eye in a never static, iridescent, optical experience that contributes massively to the feeling of freshness that Snow mentions.  I saw this painting in The Hague in 1969, and again in the 1995-6 Vermeer exhibition in the National Gallery.  I was disturbed to see less color in the face than I had remembered.  I could not find the “impressionist” dots of color.  Had the recent high-tech cleaning changed the painting?  My friends told me that others have thought so.  Had low lighting and protective glass altered my perception?  At any rate, I decided to stick with my original impression because I had spent several hours examining this face from a number of close up positions with 20-20 vision, and had formed a distinct and much-thought-over impression of magical dots of color that could appear as smooth and continuous as enamel while at the same time retaining the most subtle vibrating iridescence imaginable. 

The contradictions of feeling described by Snow result from a number of discrete contrasts in the details of the head.  The eyes and mouth are designed with full curves and slightly exaggerated “piercing” points.  Notice the right corner of the girl’s mouth.  The upper lip has been extended beyond the lower lip so that its design into a curving, down-turned, pointed shape is seen in contrast with the full curve of the lower lip.  The feelings produced by these shapes are determined by the qualitative associations that they carry.  They are initiated by what Whitehead calls “strain feelings.” Strains are our encoded felt responses to the topological aspects of form: soft, sharp, stretched, compresses, and so forth.  It is largely through strain feelings that memory, with its ability to link all modes of bodily and mental experience, gives qualitative character to events in such we participate.  In the case of the Vermeer, the feeling of poignancy derives partly from the piercing, pointed forms contrasted with the full, relaxed, sensual curves in the design, which form part of a matrix of harmonized cues and contexts stemming from the tear-like pearl, the assertive eyes, the withdrawing gesture of the head, and the knot of tension at the top of the turban – tension that is released in the turban’s vertical tail. 

Collages that include Vermeer's Head of a Young Girl:
The Evolution of a Mouth
Head of a Young Girl #2