The Rijksamuseum's "Vermeer": 3 Reviews

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

I want to compare three reviews of the Rijksamuseum’s recent blockbuster Vermeer show (February 10 – June 4, 2023) that brought together an unprecedented twenty-eight Vermeers: Rebecca Mead’s “Dutch Treat” (The New Yorker, February 27, 2023); Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside” (London Review of Books, May 18, 2023); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light” (The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2023).

Mead, in her piece, points out that the show is “organized thematically—Vermeer’s use of musical instruments; Vermeer’s depiction of gentleman callers—with works from differing periods placed together to show them to their best effect, like artfully rumpled drapery.”

She comments on several of the paintings, including Mistress and Maid, A Lady Writing, View of Delft, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Girl with the Red Hat, Lacemaker, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and The Milkmaid.

She says of Mistress and Maid and A Lady Writing,

The two paintings have thematic and stylistic commonalities. Each shows a fair-haired woman, finely dressed in a yellow satin jacket and seated at a table, with a pen in her right hand and a sheet of paper at the ready. Each displays Vermeer’s uncanny command of optical effects, with a dissolving focus on the fur trim of the jacket and a sheeny light reflected from a pearl earring. A blue tablecloth is rucked up in almost identical disarray, a circumstance that would be nothing but an annoyance to an actual letter writer—who doesn’t prefer to lay paper on a smooth surface?—but which reminds a viewer that these are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna. It is peculiarly moving to see these two works, which were painted within two years of each other, in juxtaposition. A viewer can take in one, and then the other, with a turn of the head no greater than that of the woman represented in either painting. Between them, these works consumed perhaps a year of Vermeer’s labor—a scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances and a faithful imagining of internal lives, which might better be described as an act of devotion. 

Note Mead’s reference to Vermeer’s “uncanny command of optical effects” and his “scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances.” These are two aspects of Vermeer’s art that I admire immensely. She also points out something new to me – that these paintings “are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna.” Call me naïve, but until I read this, it never occurred to me that Vermeer staged the subjects of his paintings. 

Another painting that Mead comments on is View of Delft – one of my favorite Vermeers. She writes,

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 first line is exquisite, beautifully expressing my own view of Vermeer as a master painter of light.

Was Vermeer a trickster? Mead thinks so. She says of his superb The Milkmaid,

“The Milkmaid” is an exploration of minimalism, three hundred years avant la lettre. A recent analysis of the painting’s surface revealed that Vermeer painted over a row of jugs that once hung behind the milkmaid’s head, leaving a bare wall with the tonal nuances of a Morandi. The wall’s surface is rendered with infinite care, its nails and holes painted in sharp relief. The graduation of shadow and light contributes to the sense of verisimilitude, though Vermeer adjusts optics for the sake of art by painting the jigsaw piece of wall between the jug and the milkmaid’s arm a brighter hue, the better to accentuate her gesture. The eye is tricked into believing that it sees the world reproduced; what it actually sees is the world enhanced.

Vermeer as an enhancer of reality, adjusting optics for the sake of art – that’s a view of him that I struggle with. Rightly or wrongly, I associate him with accuracy. “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination / stealing like the tide across a map / to his girl solid with yearning,” Robert Lowell wrote in his great poem “Epilogue.” To me, Vermeer is a consummate describer. That implies accuracy. I find accuracy and enhancement hard to reconcile.

Let’s consider another review – Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside.” It begins where Mead’s piece ends, with a look at one of Vermeer’s walls. This time it’s the wall in Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. Bell writes,

Nothing could be more positive than that clean, firm whitewashed wall. Creamy dabs and droplets, heavy with bright lead carbonate, have come down here and there on the more convoluted surfaces, on the gilt frame and the musician’s satin skirts. But the flat planes are immutable blocks of tone and no mark suggests that their outlines could alter. What are we to know of the objects to which they belong? Only their interactions with light.

I love that last line. Any critic praising Vermeer for his skill at painting light gets my vote. It may not be the most original approach to Vermeer’s art, but, for me, it’s the surest and most compelling. 

Bell also considers another established perspective on Vermeer – the photo-like accuracy of his work. He says, “His art seems to record appearance as tonally as a photosensitive sheet, with as little reliance on contours, and the question of how much he relied on lens technologies has been a constant of subsequent scholarship.” He quotes Kenneth Clark’s praise of View of Delft: “the nearest which painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.” But Bell dissents. He says, when you see the actual paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum, you “discover how different in fact they are from photographs:

There in the opening gallery stands View of Delft, and there in its middle band – the town buildings sandwiched between thin air and yielding water – the oils are caked and burly. Gritty earth-colour gouts lay down the masonries of brick, mortar, slate and limestone. Facing Vermeer’s home town, we encounter the tension posed by his single-figure interiors: between the concrete fact and its not-hereness. This is the testament of an insider who needs to stand outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.

This is a valuable observation, emphasizing the texture of Vermeer’s painting. Simon Schama made a similar point in his excellent “Through a Glass Brightly” (included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of a Vermeer show at the National Gallery in 1995. Looking at View of Delft, he says, “The texture of the red-tiled roofs at left, for example, was made more dense by mixing sand into the pigment, almost as if Vermeer was as much rebuilder as image-maker.”

My favorite lines in Bell’s piece occur in his consideration of the infrared images of The Milkmaid. He writes,

They show cluttered shelves behind the serving woman, which were afterwards smoothed out to leave a bare wall. To isolate in this way the central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle, was a potent decision. 

That “central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle” is inspired.

What to make of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light”? I find it the least satisfying of the three reviews under consideration. Yeazell considers the Rijksmuseum show in terms of its organization and crowd management. But, amazingly and disappointingly, she doesn’t discuss (or describe) any of the paintings on display. She considers several theories on Vermeer’s art, some of them pretty far out, if you ask me, e.g., that Vermeer’s figures can be divided into “extroverts” and “introverts,” that the Jesuits “provided the chief inspiration for his treatment of light as a spiritual phenomenon,” that there’s a “suggestive analogy between the remoteness of Petrarch’s beloved Laura and the various strategies Vermeer devises for rendering his own objects of desire at once alluring and unobtainable.” Did Vermeer even read Petrarch? She doesn’t say.

Yeazell also considers a theory that seems to me to have been around forever – that Vermeer used a camera obscura. She concludes, “no definitive evidence has emerged to link Vermeer to such an instrument.” There, you’d think (and hope) that would finally settle it. But no, a few paragraphs later, she undermines her conclusion, buying into Gregor J. M. Weber’s “informed speculation” that “the local Jesuits probably did serve as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowledge of the camera obscura.”

So where does that leave us? It leaves me savoring that wonderful Rebecca Mead description of View of Delft: “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream.”