Friday Flowers: Tulipomania

Purple tulips to commemorate Tulipomania (1637)

Colored Hats
(By Gertrude Stein)

Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.


I adore Gertrude Stein and her amazing skill at crafting sound, combining words in such a manner as to create new meaning and significance through cadence and imagery and juxtaposition, going on and going on, with repetition and resonance rolling the words off the tongue, through the mind, almost hypnotic, entrancing, in their flow. ;-)

Purple tulips in a glass vase

And what of the tulips? Well, I was going to put up another camellia post, but I realized that today marks the collapse of the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s. I couldn' pass up on that.

Interior of a Dutch World

Detail of Woman Drinking with Soldiers (1658) by Pieter de Hooch


I love paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. Although Vermeer is my favorite, I often feel that Pieter de Hooch comes in second. It's the intimacy of the interior genre scene, a humanizing image, that captures my enthusiasm, pulling my imagination back in time to life in the 17th century.

Pieter de Hooch's work has an undeniable beauty, a lustre, that entrances the eye with subtle plays of light, delineations of space, colors both muted and bright. And the narrative of the image is perhaps the thing that I adore most. His paintings are frozen instances of a tale, as if caught in amber, making the viewer consider the activity which is taking place and that which may arise from this moment.

Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658) by Pieter de Hooch

Back in 1996, I once assigned myself a writing practice: for a month, look at a new de Hooch each day and outline a story inspired by it. Nothing ever came of it, but it was a fun and challenging experiment. Maybe I'll try it again some day.

The Virtue of Temperance

Woman with a Lute (c. 1663) by Johannes Vermeer

From July 8 to September 26, the Norton Simon Museum will be exhibiting Vermeer's Woman with a Lute. This painting is on loan from the Metropolitan Museum and is making its first showing on the West Coast. It is one of Vermeer's "Pearl Pictures" catching a moment frozen in time, luminescent and dream-like.

Vermeer is probably my favorite painter. When the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC had their amazingly comprehensive exhibit back in late '95, I actually took some vacation time and flew out to attend the opening week. It was so very worth the effort and expense. I know that I write this a lot in these posts, but no reproduction can do these painting justice. The layers of glaze and diluted saturated pigments that Vermeer uses captures the light within the paintings. It is as if they have an inner glow.

Of course, I had to attend the opening display of this painting on Thursday night. Yeah, I braved the crowd of over 500 fellow art enthusiasts and rush hour traffic on the Pasadena Freeway to do so, but I would have spent the night in regrets if I didn't. ;-)



Reception in the Garden



Reception in the Entry Hall


I can write all day about the glories of Vermeer's paintings. Over the next few months, I'll be visiting the Norton Simon to view this painting many times. Perhaps I'll write a series of posts on Vermeer and why I so adore his works. Perhaps. . .