QUIET REVOLUTIONARIES

In the second volume of his sweeping art-historical compendium The Lives of the Painters (1969), John Canaday includes a chapter titled “Vermeer and the Quietest Revolution.” “Of all the contrasts between schools of art in the seventeenth century,” Canaday begins, “the most extreme was surely the one between the grandiosity of official art in the princely tradition and the intimacy of the first art ever produced for consumption by burghers.” He continues: “The difference in physical dimensions between paintings that covered walls and ceilings of palaces or churches, and a painting that could be tucked under your arm and taken home and hung in your own room, was paralleled by the difference between the dramatic grandeur of an art dealing with gods, heroes, and saints, or the nature and fate of man, and the coziness of a Netherlandish art—usually Dutch—that depicted familiar scenes for their own sake.” While Rembrandt, Canaday writes, “pondered deep questions, his contemporaries by the dozen in Holland were content to record the activities, the landscape, and the appurtenances of daily life.” Citing Vermeer as chief among this new type of painter, Canaday conceded that he and his colleagues did not “think of themselves as revolutionaries (they were creating salable objects to meet an existing demand), but they were nevertheless the protagonists of a major revolution—the quietest revolution in art history.”

This contrast that Canaday eloquently touches on—between the scale