Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pieter Duyfhuijsen (Pieter Colinchovius)
Dutch; 17th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
83%
Portrait of a Young Woman. c1645. Oil on panel
From many Dutch portraits you get the sense that all the networked gestures of limbs and crooked objects amounts to something. Not so here — and it's fantastic. There's a pure ambivalence of spatial relation between, say, the book on the cushion and the subject's hand pointing vaguely off-frame away from it; the wicker bag hangs off the back of that chair the way a wicker bag would hang off the back of a chair. Everything's floating here with all this empty space around it, and yet that space is somehow impossibly shallow, too — look at how perspectival the tiled floor is, till, with the immediacy of a car crash, it slams into the wall less than a quarter of the way up the panel. But then that wall itself is a dappled world of light coming in from the left, not a reality for the viewer to fall further into but an instance of pure painterly charm. In its simplicity this painting is more like a Vrel than a Vermeer, but it has the touch, too, of a handler of paint like Ruisdael. (TFS, 2026)