Vermeer’s Revelations
Of all the great painters of the golden age when the small, soggy Netherlands arose as an improbable global power, Johannes Vermeer is the most beloved and the most disarming. Rembrandt gives us grandeur and human frailty, Frans Hals gives us brio, Pieter de Hooch gives us busy burghers, but Vermeer issues an invitation. The trompe l’oeil curtain is pulled back, and if the people on the other side don’t turn to greet us, it’s only because we are always expected.
Vermeer’s paintings are few in number and scattered over three continents, and they rarely travel. The 28 gathered in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum’s current, dazzling exhibition represent about three-quarters of the surviving work—“a greater number than the artist might have ever seen together himself,” a co-curator, Pieter Roelofs, notes—and make this the largest Vermeer show in history. The previous record holder took place 27 years ago at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague. Prior to that, the only chance to see anything close would have been the Amsterdam auction in May 1696 that dispersed perhaps half of everything he’d painted in his life.
At the Rijksmuseum, the light levels are low, the walls dark, and every painting has room to breathe. Visitors drop their voice as if in church. But for all the reverence his work now enjoys, and for all the moment-stretched-to-eternity quietude that his paintings project, the afterlife of Vermeer has been a rough ride, bouncing from local prominence to obscurity to cinematic stardom courtesy of Colin Firth. Vermeer’s work was at the center of the most stupendous forgery scandal of the 20th century, as well as its most spectacular art theft. (The Concert, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and not seen since, is a palpable absence in Amsterdam.) Vermeer, the man, has been depicted as a paradigm of Calvinist restraint, a passionate Catholic convert, and a model of empiricism. Almost four centuries after his birth, experts remain at odds about his intentions, his methods, and which paintings he actually made.
It is revelatory to walk through the complete arc of Vermeer’s career, from the early, inexpert attempts at heroic mythological and biblical scenes (reminders that even the most sublime of painters has a learning curve) to the late, strange Allegory of the Catholic Faith—but the works in between are what slow visitors to a crawl and then a standstill. Though the catalog offers a cornucopia of up-to-date scholarship and enlarged images, in the museum itself, wall texts are kept to a minimum. This is a show about looking.
The first thing you see is the sweeping sky of Vermeer’s , glowing, truncated left and right like a prelapsarian Edward Hopper. His only extant portrayals of the outdoors, the two pictures stake the domain that he would make his own: a brick-and-mortar world made boundless through the workings of light.
