Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gerard ter Borch (Gerard Terburg)
Dutch; 17th-century
New York, NY: Frick Collection
85%
Portrait of a Young Lady. c1665-70. Oil on canvas
If portraiture in its essence is a matter of setting figures against grounds, this is among the purest portraits there is, period. Its purity lies not so much in how sharply the girl is cut against that hazy wall of gray (an icon isn't a portrait, after all) but rather in the way, in being so cut, she articulates her surroundings as surroundings. She's the paragon of a presence and in so being she makes this image a world. This is vague. But look at the line behind her that's formed by the meeting of the wall and the floor: to the left, it's firm and visible; to the right, where things are darker, it's been blended almost to nothing — the one indicator that there's space and volume in this depiction, lost within paint and the play of light. And yet, the girl isn't a sprite floating in ether: she is a girl standing in a room. (Which is made even less plausible by the fact that she's been cropped at the ankles, but still she's standing.) She manages this by her stance in one-eighth profile, by the nonsymmetrical rhythm of whites against the black of her cloak, by the disconnect between the realness of her dress and the porcelain artificiality of her skin, by the small miracle of that ring on her pinky. (TFS, 2025)
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)