February 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s excellent “Dutch Treat,” a review of Rijksmuseum’s landmark Vermeer exhibition. Mead writes, “The Rijksmuseum has corralled enough Vermeers to make the most hard-hearted of robber barons swoon—twenty-eight paintings, out of an acknowledged thirty-six or thirty-seven surviving works by the artist, who may have produced no more than fifty in his short lifetime.” She says that the exhibition “gathers more Vermeers in one place than Vermeer himself ever had the opportunity to see.” 

One of the Vermeers on display is the magnificent View of Delft (c. 1660). Proust thought this “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Mead describes it wonderfully:

The latter work, a cityscape in which the red-roofed town appears as a horizontal sliver between glimmering water below and a wide swath of sky above, inspired the rediscovery, beginning in the eighteen-sixties, of Vermeer, whose reputation had languished in the preceding two centuries. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream” is superb! The entire review is superb! I enjoyed it immensely.

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (c. 1660)