Woman In Blue

Sam's review

A couple of months ago, I reviewed Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, an atmospheric tale that delicately intertwines three narratives and timelines, including the story of Yves Klein’s arrival in the Paris art scene. I was so taken by Bruton's writing that I sought out his latest novel, Woman In Blue, published in 2024. Like its predecessor, it weaves art history into the plot, makes extensive references to the colour blue, and finds an unusual way of examining how infatuation and love can befall us. Unlike Blue Postcards’ use of postcard-length notes to tell its story, Woman In Blue follows a more conventional form, although it still uses some non-traditional elements. 

The story is structured in alternating chapters using two different narrators. The first is an unnamed man, a writer, who makes a daily trip to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to gaze at the Vermeer painting that gives the book its title, Woman In Blue Reading A Letter. The second narrator is the woman in the painting, who recounts her experience with Vermeer, in which the relationship between artist and subject changes to that of lovers. The woman also tells us what it’s like to be looked at within the painting: how it feels when the writer, and other visitors to the museum, stare at her.

The man’s descriptions of his visits capture in great detail the intricacies of the painting itself: “I notice the way the young woman's hair is pinned up so that, with her head bent over the letter she reads, her neck is bare and her hair falls in clotted curls onto one cheek.” Bruton also evokes the intimacy of looking at art: “What I like about the painting - one of the many things I like - is how cleverly the artist has included me in it and made me complicit in the looking.” There is a nod here to the woman being under the male gaze, but it is just a nod. Bruton is more concerned with the emotional resonance of art than the politics of it.

As the story progresses, we learn that the man keeps his visits secret from his wife out of fear of his infatuation with the painting being misunderstood, particularly as she views it as the “sexiest” of Vermeer’s works. The married couple have drifted apart, not irrevocably or damagingly, but in the way many longterm relationships do. The painting becomes the subject of the man’s unexpressed affection for his wife. It seems that art created with love can also inspire love or become a vessel for a love that isn’t put into words.

The complications of love are also central to the woman’s story. Each of her chapters start and end with either "[h]e loves me" or "[h]e loves me not.”  The identity of the “he” might be the man staring at the painting in the museum, the artist, or both, while the woman is both the subject of love and a person who desires love. These various ambiguities arise from a simple plan she concocted with her mother's housekeeper, Katrijn, to make money: “He [the artist] will pay me just to sit and look pretty, you’ll see.” The plan, inevitably, proves not to be as simple as first thought. The woman and Vermeer fall for each other, to varying degrees. Once again, while there are politics in the background - Vermeer’s position as a wealthy man employing a poor woman - they are worn lightly in the text. The relationship is not abusive and both people derive at least part of what they wanted when they embarked upon it. 

As the novel progresses, the man’s story remains largely static, events consisting largely of his visits to the gallery. But this stasis provides space for contemplation of the book’s themes. It’s the woman’s storyline that provides the book’s momentum and most of the plot points. What will become of her and Vermeer? What is her relationship with Katrijn, and what do they plan to do with the money? Bruton paints the stories beautifully, with small observations of scenery and behaviour that draw us into two different worlds. One of his great strengths as a novelist is his questioning of the nature of art itself. The novel asks: “How honest can a painting be when it tries to catch a moment, to still time to something frozen? This moment, the moment of the painting, is something that in reality stretched over months." It wonders whether “[i]deas, writers’ ideas at least, are so fragile sometimes and so without shape that they are not something that can be easily held in the hands.” Such questions ask us to reflect on the spatial, temporal and material aspects of painting in particular and art in general.

The maxim that “[w]riting about music is like dancing about architecture" can also be easily applied to visual art. Bruton’s deep love for the medium - both the craft that creates it and the emotions it generates - is communicated so gently, deftly, and irresistibly, that he could make a dancefloor out of any gallery. Woman In Blue is layered and thoughtful. It will encourage you to visit an exhibition to gaze on paintings and imagine the stories that might lie behind them.  

You will live beyond one lifetime and beyond even two in the painting he makes of you.

In the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, there is a painting called ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’. Each day a man visits to gaze at it. He is irresistibly drawn to it. Obsessed by it. He studies the painting, in search of resolutions to his past and present loves, and the Woman in Blue studies him back. For there is more to the Woman in Blue than any of the men who gaze upon her realise. She has a story of her own to tell.

With a delicate balance of truth and fiction, past and present, Bruton masterfully explores the intersection between art, artist and viewer, arriving at a profound meditation on love and creation.