Some Of My Favorite Lawrence Gowing Quotes

Lawrence Gowing’s 1952 book Vermeer has been such a powerful inspiration on my work. Influencing both the materials I used and the paintings I chose to replicate; the Pixelated Pearl Vermeer series would literally not exist without his writings. But it’s a bit of a black hole online. While there are references to, and scans of, the book, there aren’t a lot of quote excerpts, especially around the pearl picture concept. So here is a collection of my favorite Lawrence Gowing quotes about Vermeer and his pearl pictures.

“Thus it comes about that we see Vermeer building the ideal shape of domestic and feminine life. The representation, the construing ever more closely of the aspect of the beloved as it moulds her mask of light, is also an independent, intact construction of the essential forms of female being, in their permanence.” — Lawrence Gowing, 1952, Vermeer

This is the particular theme of the pearl pictures, a gentile stillness of stature. The shape is vertical. The figure appears, tender and immaculate, out of the cleft shadow of the cumbrous furniture; it is rooted in it, rooted, as we see at last, utterly unmoving, to the floor. And beside this upright shape, this pillar, we come to know another, its antithesis that nevertheless easily and equally combines with it. It is the shape of a bell. It is noticed as the shape of the raised skirt in The Music Lesson. More essentially we remember it as the shape of rounded shoulders which is often the stooping shape of preoccupation, of a woman bent attentively over a table. It is a feminine self possession…” — Lawrence Gowing, 1952, Vermeer

“It seems as if he was of a god-like detachment, more balanced, more civilized, more accomplished, and more immune from the infection of his time than any painter before or since. Or else he was of a naivety beyond belief, all eye and nothing else, a deaf-mute painter perhaps, almost an idiot in the lack of any of the mental furniture that normally clutters the passage between eye and hand, a walking retina drilled like a machine.” — Lawrence Gowing, 1952, Vermeer

“… incident and material have evaporated and light is the sole active principle that remains within the confines of the picture. The window itself has a new significance. The inhabitants of the room turn to it as to the source of their being: its light recreates them.” — Lawrence Gowing, 1952, Vermeer

“Yet her distance remains; with gentle firmness the impartial tones convey it. Tangled defences are woven about her: she is enclosed in the impenetrable envelope of space. We have come upon female life in its whole secluded richness: engrossed in itself it is seen entire and unimpaired.” — Lawrence Gowing, 1952, Vermeer