A Digression on the Sun and the Broom

A DIGRESSION ON THE SUN AND THE BROOM
(on the margins of the exhibition "Jan Vermeer and the Golden Age of Dutch Painting" at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome)

Among the Netherlandish genre paintings presented at the Rome review, the most interesting work, psychologically and "illuminatingly" (though not necessarily artistically), was Pieter Janssens Elinga's "Interior with a Man, a Woman Reading a Letter, and a Servant." The title seems to list all the characters in the play, but, the sun streaming into the interior is an equally important character in the scene.
Elinga depicts an ill-matched—or perhaps merely quarreling—bourgeois couple: she sits in a high, richly furnished room, engrossed in reading a letter, three-quarters of her back to the viewer; her face is invisible, her head covered by a bonnet. He, elegantly dressed, is shown in the light of the doorway, standing at a table in the other room, where he had just left in agitation. His face is also invisible, obscured by his lush hair. He seeks solace by gazing out the window. He looks a bit as if he were preparing a drink with trembling hands. They both face each other – the echoes of the recent quarrel still roll through the corners of the room. Between them (and also back to them) stands the figure of a maid with a broom, her handle drawing a straight line – literally separating master from mistress. The maid, though quite a woman, tries to remain inconspicuous. With her crouched figure, she seems to say: "I'm just cleaning here." The silence in the painting is the calm after the storm, disturbed only by the steady scrape of the broom on the marble floor.

The broom is a prop that appears all too often in the interieurstukken (genre scenes in interiors) of the Dutch masters. In the Rome exhibition alone, a broomstick can be seen in at least seven paintings: leaning against a wall in the courtyard of "The Little Street" and against a door in "The Love Letter" (both by Johannes Vermeer); in the hands of Hendrik van der Burch's "Woman with a Child"; in the hands of the busy Martha in Erasmus Quellinus's "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary"; as a rod, it appears in the hand of a mother threatening Nicolaes Maes's "The Disobedient Drummer," placed in a stone bowl, flanking Pieter de Hooch's composition on the right side "Woman with a Child in the Yard." And finally, in the hands of a servant in Pieter Janssen Elinga's extraordinary canvas. A broom has been an attribute of a witch, but in this case it is more of a symbol of the famous Dutch neatness. It is the broom that gives the floors of Vermeer, Jacob van Loo, and Cornelis de Man their waxy sheen. It could be the heraldic symbol of the Netherlands – it was not without reason that MEP Nigel Farage, wishing to insult Flemish politician Herman van Rompuy, attributed to him the charisma of a mop.

The broom is also a distant cousin of the paintbrush, its crude caricature. A painter uses a brush not only to apply paint but also to organize the painting, clean surfaces, and smooth textures. It introduces order, separates light from darkness. Dutch genre scenes would lack their noble clarity and abstract discipline, so evident in the Netherlands everywhere, if the sense of aesthetics and innate gift for interior design weren't combined with a love of order, meaning simply the daily use of the broom (the above remark does not apply to the pub scenes by the two Adriaens: van Ostade and Brouver – their canvases are dominated by exemplary disorder). The composition of Elinga's painting is a complex interplay of quadrilaterals: the two brightest rectangles are high-set windows, the third an open doorway to a second room, where a bright window reappears. There are also lower windows, almost square, covered with burgundy shutters, seven paintings (in black parallelogram frames) hanging on the walls, a rectangular mirror, and the white and black squares of the floor, shown in perspective as rhombuses or trapezoids. The painting is constructed like a box—it seems to house many other paintings. Literally, as the living room walls are lined with landscapes (by van Goyen? Hobbes?), maritime scenes, and a portrait. But also figuratively: the light, wind-swaying treetops against the backdrop of a cool-white sky are two elegant, minimalist compositions placed within the window frames. The open doorway reveals a second room. The frame boldly, almost Degasesquely, cuts off the man's arms, bisects the chair—a true painting within a painting. Finally, the most extraordinary thing: the interplay of black and white parallelograms in the mirror, the reflection of fragments of floor tiles at the vanishing point of the composition – this is perhaps the first consciously "abstract painting" in European painting. A kind of "pre-Mondrian"! And it's immediately placed in a gold frame.

But the list of peculiarities contained in Elinga's composition doesn't end there. It's also one of the first paintings consciously painted against the light. This decision allowed for the depiction of a delicate beam of sunlight entering the interior, as if two curtains of the finest byssus, diagonally falling from the upper right corners of the windows. From this point on, this painting could be titled "Extraordinary Adventures of Photons in a Dark Interior." The illuminated rectangles of windows in both rooms are matched by patches of sunlight on the floor and wall. These are the second most important—after the windows—brightest accents in the dark painting. A bright carpet, as it were, spreads before the lady's red slipper, and a fluorescent rug, as it were, hangs on the wall. These patches of light were painted more materially than objects; the paint is applied thickly and textured. A passage from Bruno Schulz's "August" comes to mind: "(...) squares of radiance, dreaming their fervent dream on the floor."
The intrusion of the sun's rays into the dark room is like the tapping of pig iron from a solar furnace. The golden liquid splashes all around: the light reflects on the adjacent, darkened wall, slightly weakened, yet strong enough to create tiny, glistening droplets (reminiscent of glowing flames in a stream of flowing lava) on the carved mirror frame, and ghostly shadows, running diagonally upward, from the chair and table at which the woman sits. She, though reading, shrinks from the too-contrasting glare, as if to escape the truth – the position of her body on the chair repeats the diagonal that the reflected light traces on the wall. On the table, there is a piece of needlework set aside and an envelope crumpled with emotion. The painter concludes his story with subtle echoes – on the left, the glow of an open door appears on the freshly swept floor, and on the right, beneath a white rectangle of light on the wall – its delicate reflection in the marble, disturbed by a chair standing in the path of the light rays.

Pieter Janssens Elinga's brushwork was not as skillful as the greatest masters of Netherlandish genre scenes, but in this painting he surpasses them all with his insightful, almost hypersensitive observation of light phenomena. Painting has never before known such a complex score of light, composed of patches of brilliance, reflections in the mirror, gold, and marble, and reflections of reflections.

At the same time, these reflections illustrate the intricate psychological game played out between the spouses. At the risk of overinterpreting something (but I'm certainly not doing anything else from the start), I suspect that the sun, permeating the murky atmosphere of the richly furnished living room, suggests the need to "shed light" on the problems that divide the woman and the man. Is the animosity between them caused by wealth—lost possessions, pawned gold (suggested by the mirror's golden frame)? News of betrayal, an affair, an illegitimate child (a crumpled letter)? Mutual misunderstanding or a misunderstanding of oneself (the incomprehensible, abstract image in the mirror)?
It seems that the maid's action, standing between the quarreling spouses, signifies the need to sweep away the dirt, cleanse, or admit guilt—in short, to put their lives in order. Because nothing in life is as black and white as the floor in this room. The broom merely wipes dust from the black and white floorboards. The maid, however, doesn't notice how the sun's broom (a supernatural glow that, in Elinga's case, could represent Grace) behind her has completely whitened the black floor tiles.

And swept clean!