This morning I find myself sitting with my cats. They nap in their usual places: Hopper on the back of the couch, the others curled near my legs. As they rest, Ana Vidović performs at St. Mark’s in San Francisco. Her guitar is both bright and introspective, the sound unfolding like sunlight through dust. I scroll absently through my phone until I stop, caught by a single image: A Young Lady with a Rose in an Interior, painted by Fernand Toussaint.
The moment stills. Bach’s Fuga from the Violin Sonata No. 1 begins. The guitars voice creates lines circling one another like thoughts finding coherence. I reach for my coffee and then let my hand fall. The music, the cats, the faint morning light, the painting glowing on the small screen, all of it folds together into a single moment.
At first it is the rose that draws me in, the lone bloom drooping in her pale hands, a red so deep it seems to hum. But the longer I look, the more I sense something in her posture, a kind of quiet surrender. Her shoulders slope gently, her arms cross her lap as if to gather herself back in. Toussaint renders her beauty not as glamour but as thought. As the poise of a woman absorbed in her own private weather.
The sorrow here is not theatrical. It is contemplative. She gazes somewhere beyond us, her expression hovering between memory and reverie. The psychology of that gaze feels distinctly modern, though Toussaint worked within the refined classicism of the Belgian salons at the turn of the twentieth century. While his contemporaries painted the bustle of city life or the daring of modern fashion, Toussaint turned inward, capturing women in quiet interiors, half-lit by thought. He was less interested in the spectacle of femininity than in its consciousness. To see the woman as a thinking being, not an object.
As I sit listening to Vidović’s guitar, I realize the two women—one painted, one performing—reflect each other. Ana gives emotion sound and structure; Toussaint’s sitter gives emotion shape and silence. One translates feeling into the architecture of Bach’s counterpoint, the other into the soft geometry of folded arms and downcast eyes. Each exists within the same spectrum of introspection: one expressed through motion, the other through stillness.
Rilke once wrote, “The more one is, the richer is all that one experiences.” In both women I sense that fullness. I sense the density of an interior life. Toussaint’s brush gives sorrow its body, Vidović’s guitar gives it voice. They meet, impossibly, across centuries: one in paint, one in sound, both articulating what language can only approximate.
I think too of the painter himself. Of how, in an era when women were often depicted as decorative, Toussaint saw them as repositories of meaning. His portraits dwell in what the French call le silence éloquent, eloquent silence. His women are not speaking, but they are not mute. Their thoughts seem to press outward from the canvas, suggesting that beauty and melancholy are not opposites but necessary halves of the same human truth.
Bach’s Fuga continues its spiraling dialogue of voices, and I feel that same polyphony within the painting: the woman’s sorrow, the rose’s fragility, the artist’s empathy, the viewer’s own reflection. To experience such a work is to enter a conversation of souls.
I glance back at my cats, still sleeping, at the window light now shifting toward gold. The morning remains suspended in that peculiar equilibrium: sound and silence, beauty and sadness, exterior calm and interior motion. Toussaint’s woman, Ana’s music, and my own quiet observation converge in a single act of contemplation.
In the end, I realize the painting is not about loss, but about the courage to inhabit one’s interior life. The woman’s gaze, though distant, is not defeated. It is searching. The rose, though fading, is held tenderly. In her stillness there is agency, the same agency that exists in music, or in any act of mindful creation.
When the last note of the Fuga fades, I do not move. The woman on the screen continues her endless pause; Ana lowers her hands over the guitar’s body as the final chord dissolves. Between them I find myself listening to the invisible thread that joins sound to silence, beauty to sorrow, and the inner world to the outer one.