Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gerard ter Borch (Gerard Terburg)
Dutch; 17th-century
Montreal, Canada: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
79%
Portrait of a Lady. c1676. Oil on canvas mounted on wood
A painting like this, which is very fine, seems to be much more about the nature than the appearance of its figures and the ways they relate to each other in space. The book and the woman are rhymes of each other. The former appears to float just above the surface it's resting on; it is not quite at the edge of the table, but nevertheless it feels precariously placed. The woman relates similarly to the picture plane — she appears to float just behind it, not situated in any illusionistic or dimensional space but rather suspended in a sort of mystic, distanced supraspatial zone apart from either the depicted background or the literal surface of the canvas. The adamant reality, however, of the book beside her — it has not only more, but also a different kind of weight than anything else in the picture — serves to concentrate and, in microcosm, resolve the ambiguous depth effects of the image that surrounds it. The coexistence of firm presences and more vanishing, almost spectral ones (see also the delicate lace set against the consuming black of her dress) is what recommends this painting. (Though it could be said that better Dutch paintings manage similar effects but with more painterly panache, of which this portrait has little.) (TFS, 2025)