The Vermeer story

For years I’ve hinted at a story around an exhibition of Vermeer’s work. I finally got around to telling the tale.

Winter was an unusual time for me to be in Virginia—more often we went to visit my in-laws in summer—but in 1995 we were at my in-laws’ house in the northern Virginia suburbs.  The arts section of the newspapers and magazines had been full of news about an exhibition at the National Gallery of Jan Vermeer’s paintings, the largest exhibition of Vermeers that had ever been mounted in one place.  For such a celebrated painter, Vermeer’s body of work is remarkably small; perhaps thirty-two paintings are attributed to him without question, and more than twenty of them were in the National Gallery exhibition.  Opinion was that no one would ever be able to mount such an exhibit again.

If, that is, there was to be an exhibit at all.  The winter of 1995 was the winter when Newt Gingrich (remember him?) and the Republican members of Congress had made good on their threat to shut down and federal government in a budget scrap, and all non-essential agencies, including the Smithsonian art galleries, had sent their employees home because there was no money to pay them.  It seemed possible the entire Vermeer exhibit would end with a whimper, unseen by all but a few early goers.

At the last minute, a private fundraising campaign pulled together just enough money to pay a skeleton staff to open only the Vermeer exhibit’s gallery.  When I heard that, I decided to try to see the show despite my plantar fasciitis, which made standing for very long at a time agonizing.  (By then the condition had me using one cane regularly, and sometimes two.)  L and T decided that was too much standing in line for them, and stayed behind.

When I got to the gallery, the temperature was in the forties, but the line to see the Vermeers already stretched more than a block outside the gallery building.  Even with a cane to lean on, fasciitis had my heels were on fire before an hour was gone.  We stood . . . and waited . . . and shuffled forward . . . and waited some more . . . for hours.  Noon came and went without any chance for lunch, and we stood and waited.

Early in the afternoon I finally reached the entrance, and found myself confronted with—stairs.  Flights of stairs.  If there is anything worse than standing around with fasciitis, it’s climbing stairs with fasciitis, and I was faced with four long flights.  I staggered and hauled myself up, leaning on my cane and using the wall for what leverage I could.  I was obviously in distress; people around me were telling their children “give the man room to get up the stairs.”

We kept climbing stairs.  The agony from my heels had migrated up as far as my knees.  At last we got onto the gallery level, where the line wrapped around the rotunda before trailing down the hall to the exhibit gallery.  We were starting to get return traffic now, people who had already seen the show, so the rotunda was crowded.  I was leaning so hard on my cane, I looked something like a tripod.  And then—someone passing too close hooked a toe on my cane and pulled it out from under me.  I went down, flat on my ass in the rotunda of the National Gallery.

That caused a commotion.  Docents ran, a guard ran, everyone began picking me up and dusting me off.  Fortunately, nothing was damaged but my self-regard, although I didn’t let that on.  Out of sheer embarrassment, a docent took charge of me and walked me past the rest of the line and straight into the exhibit.

And the exhibit was worth being dumped on my ass in the rotunda of the National Gallery.  Vermeer had both the technique of the best Dutch painters and insane talent.  The only thing to regret about him is that only thirty of his paintings—the ones the critics don’t argue over “is this his or isn’t it”—survive.

I don’t think I got home before dark, dark coming before five o’clock in December in northern Virginia, but even with all the trials of the day, I was still glad I had gone.  Had I not, there’s no way I would ever have gotten to see that many paintings of such a master—and I didn’t get to do anything like it again until the Rousseau exhibit ten years later.