Three years ago, I lived in Washington, D.C. My apartment was a ten-minute walk from the National Gallery of Art. A large poster featuring a painting hung at the entrance to the gallery’s West Building. Clothes in bright colors. Different musical instruments. Light on people’s smiling faces. Every time I took a walk around the gallery after dinner, bathed in the warm summer sunshine, I would look up and smile.
I didn’t know the painter’s name or when the painting was made. I just knew from the text on the poster that it had something to do with Dutch painting.
I often went to the National Gallery of Art when I felt bored or happy, or after reading a book on art history. I didn’t know many painters back then, except for the most famous ones. I knew that Italian painters were famous and looked forward to seeing their paintings firsthand. But as I read, the art history book told me that Northern European paintings were just as good as Italian ones.
I found some paintings online, in the book, and in the gallery. I could see landscapes stretching into the distance, with trees, roads, and puddles along the way. Clouds appeared in many of the outdoor scenes. Beneath the sky were church spires or country houses. Dogs ran. Carriages rolled along. I also saw decorative objects with extremely intricate structures and the gleam of metal.
Months later, I landed in the Netherlands on a winter morning. A strip of deep blue sky hung above the platform, heavy with moisture. I stood there with two checked bags and two carry-on bags beside me. The train was delayed for seven minutes.
On the train to the city I was about to live in, I saw the horizon, red as if it were on fire, through the leafless woods. A little later, a bright orange ball hung low in the sky. As the train moved slowly along, I saw two horses on the ungreen fields, one brown, one black, trotting in the shining fog.
I biked to school every day. Some mornings, a thin grey mist drifted over the lake, where geese floated like ghosts. Sometimes snow covered the edge of the water. Footprints crisscrossed the white surface. Small birds, big birds, small dogs, big dogs, small shoes, big shoes. I cautiously added a tire track.
When the grass and bushes turned green, people seemed to sprout up around the lake. If I went there with friends, I brought a yellow blanket and lay by the water, facing the sun. If I went alone, I usually chose a tree with a medium-sized crown to sit beneath. After I came back from a vacation, I found that its crown had grown so much that I had to choose another tree. When I leaned against the trunk, I noticed that it had a coat of fluffy, light green. I ran my hand over it. It felt as hard as the trunk itself. Where was the fluffy touch I had expected?
In summer, matcha-colored duckweed began to spread outward from the shore. Black birds often cruised through the dense patches, which closed again behind them. Ducks glided across the glossy water, leaving V-shaped ripples behind. Other waterbirds made their way ashore along a narrow wooden ramp beneath branches whose leaves trailed in the water. I ripped open a bag of cookies. They came for the crumbs.
There were many roads leading to the park. One of them passed a house with powder-pink doors and window frames. Beside a curtained window, beneath a tree in full bloom, stood a narrow wooden shelf. It was always full of books. Pedestrians stopped. Cyclists turned their heads.
Along another road, every house was different. A white house surrounded by red roses. Clusters of pink blossoms beside a royal-blue door. A bright yellow bicycle leaning against a mustard-yellow window frame. A dark green lamp hanging outside a reddish-brown brick house. I biked past, stared, looked back, stopped, walked my bicycle back, and took a photo.
I still had the habit of walking around. On clear evenings, I wandered toward the city center. The doors of a locked building were decorated with gilded branches. One of the gilded branches glowed in the evening sun. As daylight faded, I passed a three-story house at the exit of a roundabout. Its rippled floor-to-ceiling windows became a blur of gold. The chandelier inside was unlit, but the glass pendants shimmered with orange and bronze light. Beneath them was a blurred silhouette, an arm rising and falling.
One of the roads home was an unpaved path lined with tall and short trees. In summer, flies buzzed in the warm air. On the stretches without shade, I slowed my pace as the sun warmed my back.
When the weather cooled, the shade beneath the trees shrank. The leaves turned yellow. The bushes lost their fullness, and their green deepened. Rainy days became more frequent. The soil softened. The stream beside the path ran lower and clearer. Its glossy surface was gone. The water rippled like a sheet of glass broken open by a sudden gust of wind. The wind carried the smell of the trees with it. I took a deep breath and pulled my hat down.
I still wandered through galleries. In one painting, hunters walked down a snow-covered slope with their dogs following behind. In another, the sun turned the facade of an old weigh house golden, while an old woman sat on its steps. In yet another, a narrow passage between two small houses was closed off by a black iron gate, where children were playing.
I pointed my phone at the paintings and zoomed in, then in again, until there was no frame, no signature. They looked just like the photographs I had taken after stopping my bicycle.
One day, I took a train to a nearby city. There was an exhibition by a Dutch painter named Gerrit van Honthorst. I sat by the window, watching rain slant across the dirty glass. Cows rested beneath the trees, and horses in blankets stood outside their stables. After the train had gone on for a while, the sky began to clear. At first, the clouds still gathered in thick masses. As the train moved on, they separated into individual clouds, flat underneath and fluffy on top, some grey, some pure white. The sky turned blue. The trees dividing the fields stood thick and close together, greener in the sunlight. Closer to the railway, crows lifted from the harvested wheat fields.
When I entered the exhibition, the faces of the violinists in front of me were so familiar. The clothes. The light on the faces. And the smiles.
After leaving the exhibition, I walked along the old canal. I stopped at a shop selling old photographs and vintage glassware and looked at wine glasses of different colors and sizes in the window. In a home décor shop, I picked up a dachshund-shaped candlestick with a “Buy One, Get One Free” sticker attached. I wandered through the shopping mall, looked at blind boxes, then at the latest LEGO sets. Downstairs at the supermarket, I bought a sandwich and a bottle of vitamin drink for the train ride home.
On the train back, I googled the name of that painting at the National Gallery of Art. The painting is called The Concert.
Created by Gerrit van Honthorst.