An Instant Moment of Recollection
The scene in this painting can easily be dismissed as something trivial, as an everyday happening. But (with some imagination) it might just as well serve as a reflection of something deeper.
History holds many intriguing painters, and the one in this post is definitely one. Not only is the painter himself obscure for us, but his paintings hold mysteries as well. This makes it possible to attempt some interpretations of our own.
Jacobus Vrel
Jacobus Vrel was, according to Wikipedia, a Dutch, Flemish, or Westphalian painter and lived from ca. 1630 to 1680. Apparently, little is known about him, as his sparse page on Wikipedia reflects. Roaming the net for other resources, this person remains enigmatic. We are not sure of his exact birthdate or where he lived, and only 50 paintings bear his name. It was only in the 1890s that it became clear—through an analysis of his painting style—that he must have been Dutch. The span of his active period seems to be the years 1654–1662. His work was for some time mistakenly taken to be that of Johannes Vermeer, but in the 1860s French art critic Théophile Thoré (1807-1869) discovered he was an independent painter.
Personally, I find his paintings quite intriguing. He painted in the Dutch Golden Age, and his work shows this, but there's more. There is something mysterious about the scenes he painted. It is as if he has travelled to another world, similar to ours but still unfamiliar. If we put his pictures together, we glimpse the contours of a particular mood, so to say. We don’t often get to see the faces of the people painted; often they are depicted in profile or from behind. However, I find a calmness in the pictures that is soothing somehow; there is no drama here, and there are typically few elements in view, making many of his compositions «tidy».
An Enigmatic Painting
…as is the case also with the image in this post. This is Vrel’s most well-known painting. What we see is what appears to be an old woman, sitting on the edge of her chair, tipping it over in order to get closer to the little girl outside her window. The room has no furniture but the window's curtain and the decor plates above it. The window has cracks and repairs in it, indicating that it is not new. A piece of paper lies on the floor. In the upper-right corner of the window is some kind of light, from an unknown source.
If we look closer, the woman on the chair looks quite eager to come in contact with the girl outside. She is nearly tipping over, and it doesn’t seem natural to be able to sit like that for very long. The way I see it, Vrel has painted the brief moment between the woman noticing the girl outside and the point where the chair slips, and she hits the floor.
What made her react in such a hasty way, turning around to the window like that?
As we have very few clues to what the image is about, we can only guess. My guess is unorthodox, perhaps, but still, I take that chance: the old woman finds herself as a little girl outside the glass. She is sitting by the window, resting or dozing perhaps, as she feels someone is looking at her from the outside. As she turns her head to investigate, she sees a familiar face from many years back. With a sudden and unfamiliar excitement, not really sure of what she sees, she turns towards the window and gets a glimpse of herself out there in the dark. The little girl looks right back at her and smiles, worn out it seems, as if she wants to rest soon.
A Conversation With A Pervious Self
I find the scene captivating. Some of us have this need, from time to time, to talk to our past selves and converse with other, more innocent versions of ourselves. I admit, there are occasions when I do this. When confronted with difficult choices or how to perceive a present situation, I sometimes consult my former self. As I develop and gain more experience in life, I grow as a person but also get… tainted by life, so to speak.
Occasionally, I long for a purer version of myself, the one that could handle anything and never saw a problem, only possibilities. What would he—I—do in the situations I find myself in at the present time? What if I had made different choices? Who would I be? Not everyone thinks what-ifs are good for reflection, but I believe my past self holds all the possibilities in the world, and my life is one of many. Even though I am fairly content with my life, I find gratification in the view that my present state is not my only option.
To me, the painting of Vrel contains an aspect of melancholy but also hope, as we carry with us in history the development of ourselves as children. In reality it is not the exact version of our child-self that we take with us, but a constructed entity of both ourselves and our childhood. The situations we encounter and experiences that develop change not only us but also the way we view ourselves as younger. The conception of myself as a child today probably differs from the one I had ten or twenty years back.
In my view, this psychological fact doesn’t really matter much to me. I acknowledge that it is not my historical self that I take with me through the years, but an ever-evolving development of the child I was. Still, there is something in my past «being» that can be productive here and now. If I am aware of how I change through the decades, I am able to acknowledge the reasons for changing. Such knowledge provides me an opportunity to review these reasons, kind of «reset» my mindset to a previous level in the game of life, and give it another try. Develop my view on things in a different direction. Sometimes I sit down with some music videos from my youth and look through them all. This actually—believe it or not—gives me quite a lot of energy. I am brought back to my younger days, and I get reminded of how things used to look. This state of mind tends to stay with me for a while, and when I feel that everything has stagnated in my present situation, this gives me the go-ahead to do something about it.
There is something hidden in the past that can provide new opportunities and perspectives in the present.
Well, dear reader, these are my reflections on this painting. You probably have some entirely different ones, but I hope you take a minute to contemplate what this enigmatic painting means to you.
As music has its own way of conveying messages, I end this post with one of the finest songs by Adele I have ever heard.