Doorsien, and why Vermeer doesn't employ it

I should alert you from the beginning that what follows probably isn't going to set the art history world ablaze. It's just one of those "ah-ha!" moments that, for me at least, gives me a handle on thinking about a painter whose works I love and, as long-time readers know, have posted about before.

Doorsien is a Dutch word that literally means "plunge through." Here is a description of how doorsien works, from Karel van Mander's 1604 book, The Painter's Book:

Our composition should enjoy a fine quality, for the delight of our sense, if we there allow a view [insien] or vista [doorsien] with small background figures and a distant landscape, into which the eyes can plunge. We should take care sometimes to place our figures in the middle of the foreground, and let one see over them for many miles. (quoted in Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, 8

In my Humanities class on Wednesday, I spent a little time talking about doorsien in relation to this painting by Pieter de Hooch, The Linen Closet. Those of you who actually click on the "Read More" buttons you see in the posts here might remember my having blogged about this painting not long ago.

More below the fold.

You can clearly see doorsien at work in this painting: the views through the windows and door allow the viewer's eye a passage through the foregrounded space out into, depending on our route, the larger world or into the neighbor's house across the street. As I was discussing it in class, I found myself remembering my first real in-person exposure to Dutch painting, this 2001 exhibition in New York, and being struck by how different the Vermeers looked from the paintings of his contemporaries. Everyone was there to see the Vermeers and I was too, but I hadn't seen many of them before, just a few of them, and that trip would serve as my introduction to the other painters. Many of the other paintings exhibited the same technical mastery that the Vermeers showed, and the subject matter was the same or very similar in each (the galleries were arranged thematically, the Vermeers not set apart from the others). But the Vermeers were easily identifiable, even from across the room. I had assumed before going that they would all look pretty much alike, but they could not be more different. What differed was Vermeer's treatment of these scenes, specifically his rendering of interior space. To be specific, Vermeer's contemporaries, more often than not, employed doorsien; Vermeer didn't.

Vermeer comes closest to employing doorsien in this painting,
A Maid Asleep.We can see through a door into another room and, on the opposite wall, the frame and barest edge of a mirror. That far room has light from a window coming into it but, as is typical with Vermeer's interiors, we can't see the window itself, much less what lies beyond it.

What's the effect of this? The space depicted in de Hooch's painting has a fluidity to it--for me, anyway, that space is so fluid that I find myself looking through the door and window as much as I do at the women and the small boy (yes--a boy, according to what I've read). For the viewer, the boundaries between interior and exterior are exceedingly blurred here. We note these people, find them pleasant enough, but that's about as far as it goes. In Vermeer's painting, all is interior. The eye isn't allowed to roam; we see, through the door, that there's not much to see except, via the mirror, that room and the room the maid is in, and so we don't worry about it anymore. So, we are compelled to contemplate the maid. And more: we wonder at her weariness, at her life. I find myself wondering just what the quality of her sleep is. I don't wonder at the quality of wakefulness of de Hooch's figures. Vermeer's maid's solitariness, the fact that the outside world is Outside, creates in this painting an intensity and, above all, an overwhelming sense of intimacy and privacy that the de Hooch just doesn't have. We are quiet; we don't want to disturb; we will tiptoe away quietly as soon as we're through contemplating. But that might not be for a while.

Somewhere in some online reading on doorsien a while back, someone wrote that it is such a prominent feature in Dutch painting because distinctions between public and private space were still very much in flux. Perhaps. But I personally don't think one has to look at too many of them before one realizes that Vermeer, at least, understood those distinctions very well.

(Originally posted at Blog Meridian)

UPDATE (May 3, 2007): Jonathan Janson of the most-excellent Essential Vermeer offers an extended reading of A Maid Asleep here.

Money quote:

The premonitory quality of the painting might be supported by various iconographic and symbolic interpretations. The young girl's pose indicates that she is either asleep, in a state of drunkenness or afflicted by what was referred to in the seventeenth-century as melancholia. Artistic intuition has long been perceived as being feminine in nature, the nine muses of the arts are in fact, female. Melancholia, drunkenness and sleep have often represented the temporary suspension of the conscious mind which favors artistic creativity. Thus, the young girl who sleeps might be considered as the artist's creative unconscious whose power is alone capable of "opening the door" to newer and profounder artistic means of expression. A rather common dream in which the dreamer slowly passes from one room to others with which he is not yet familiar with, is usually interpreted by modern psychoanalysis as a becoming aware of ones latent and hitherto unexplored unconscious resources. The dimly lit dream-like atmosphere of the painting tends to confirm, on an esthetic plane, this symbolic interpretation.