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Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002) 280-283



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The Woman with the Pearl Necklace

Caroline Walker Bynum


In April of 2001 I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the exhibit Vermeer and the Delft School. I was tired after a hectic week of teaching, but fearing that the spring would slip away and I wouldn't get to the exhibit at all, I determined to squeeze in a visit to the museum on a Friday night just at the dinner hour when, I hoped, the galleries would be emptying. The rooms were, however, crowded. And the early parts of the show, devoted as they were to the Delft context, frustrated me in a way they would not have done had I been less tired. I wanted to see Vermeers. One or two of the Fabritiuses came as a revelation, and I have always liked de Hooch. Nonetheless, I didn't see what the New Yorker called "the Met at its best: a stately procession of masterpieces." There were too many people, too many paintings, too many objects, too much text to read. Until I came to The Woman with the Pearl Necklace.

I have spent much time in Berlin and know exactly where the painting usually hangs in the Gemäldegalerie. Not only the Woman herself but also her setting mean a great deal to me, for I can remember the city (not so many years ago) when there was no Gemäldegalerie in the Kulturforum, when the collections were divided, when some of what one most wanted to view took visas and police checks and sealed subway trains to reach. I never see her in her Berlin setting, where the rooms are quiet, the floors polished, and the light is gray, pearl-like, [End Page 280] almost Vermeer's, without rejoicing that I can see her there. To find her in the Met show gave me a moment of peace, and I stood for a long time before her upraised arms, her earnest innocent look, and the Vermeer light that pours over her. For a moment the crowds fell away.

When I returned home, I mentioned to my husband what I had enjoyed most about the exhibit and then turned to other pressing matters. My brief report to him is important because it confirms what I saw.

Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I got up early, having decided to be at the Met when it opened. I wanted to go immediately to the end of the exhibit (as I often do) and work my way back against the crowd to see more of the paintings in peace. I was less tired; it was the weekend; the crowds lined up on the steps outside the Met were there to see the dresses of "Jackie O," not Vermeer. I could anticipate leisurely viewing.

But The Woman with the Pearl Necklace was not there. Slowly I turned back through the exhibit, looking. I counted the Vermeers. The reviews had said there were fifteen, possibly sixteen if one accepted a disputed attribution. I counted fifteen, without the Woman.

In something approaching terror, I then went quietly, deliberately, room by room, studying the labels. There was a painting from Berlin, but it was The Glass of Wine—busier, more orange and elegant. In it, the woman has always seemed to me to hold a glass to her face forever, hiding in it, shielded by it, her male companion foppish, supercilious, ever so slightly threatening. One cannot imagine anything there ever moving. But the Woman with her yellow ribbon and pearls, her lips slightly open, seems to me caught in the movement of thinking itself. The two paintings are completely different. I could not have confused one with the other. Where then was the Woman?

I went into the alcove where catalogues of the exhibit were displayed and began to read. Perhaps the Woman had been included only in the early weeks of the show. But my obsessive scrutiny established only that she had never been there. The sort of middle-aged panic one...

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