Connections/Living with Vermeer

I'm Walter Liedtke, and my field is Dutch and Flemish painting. I'm talking about "Living with Vermeer."

I think there is something Dutch about the way I live. To go home everyday from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the countryside is a really nice contrast.

That part of Westchester County is stone walls and trees, and the house is a small, one-hundred-year old country house. The decoration's rather Dutch.

I have six Dutch seventeenth-century paintings and a number of engravings, and also a very Dutch thing is that I collect

Chinese porcelain of the 1600s. One of the things I like about collecting

porcelain, I don't think historically about it. I don't know what's going on in China at that time and that's kind of liberating.

At the essential level I think what's the most Dutch about it is this constant return to immediate experience. I get up, I go to the barn, I clean the horse stalls at 6:30 in the morning.

If the horse is sick, you do something. If the horse is hungry, you do something. There is this matter-of-factness to daily life. Something depends on you, in an essential way.

I lived in Amsterdam for a year and I had a motorcycle I'd drive all around the countryside

and the horizon is at your knee level, 360 degrees, and the sky is like this enormous vault with clouds.

Just a sense of light and endless space. You don't really understand that in Dutch painting until you've felt it on the ground. I'll meet people

from the Netherlands and somehow we're connected. And they'll say, "You know, there's one Dutch picture we really like more than any other."

It's not Rembrandt, it's not Vermeer, you'd never know. It's

van Goyen's View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmer Meer, with its high sky and the saturated water

speaks more of the Netherlands to natives than any other painting. I think that the interest in Dutch paintings began

because I was very visual as a kid. That goes back to maybe watching too much television.

I'm very responsive to visual patterns rather than narrative structures.

I became fascinated with the play between perception and making a picture. And nothing really presses those questions more than

Vermeer. Vermeer is complicated and simple at the same time, the way he handles light, and looks at

objects. They're very realistic, but also very still. It is so closely watched, so hypnotically studied

they seem like a vision. And I love that dawn of the person, of personal

psychology. Here's my maid, and I should chew her out for neglecting her duties

but in fact, she's so sweet and the behavior is so human that I can't say a thing. The tranquility of his best-known paintings I think appeals to people in the modern world because we live such busy lives.

It's that image of harmony, quietude. It's like a personal vision.

You might have it anywhere, on the train, or at home. And he did that deliberately.

It's more vivid, more real internally in your mind

than it is even in your eyes.