April 20, 2026 Issue

Vermeer is one of my favorite painters. I love his ability to render light. I love his photo-like accuracy. I think his View of Delft is one of the loveliest pictures ever painted. When I saw that this week’s New Yorker contained a piece on Vermeer by Anthony Lane, I avidly turned to it. It’s a review of a new book – Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. Lane likes it. He likes Graham-Dixon’s religious readings of Vermeer’s work, e.g., his interpretation of View of Delft:

He regards the radiance in “View of Delft” both as that of a familiar, peaceable town, glittering after the rains and tempests of a brutal epoch, and as a vision of the heavenly city, as vouchsafed in the Book of Revelation. To look at the painting, he writes, is to sense “a rainbow at our backs.”

Sorry, I don’t buy it – at least not the “Book of Revelations” part. But that’s just me, a deep skeptic when it comes to religion. Lane finds Graham-Dixon’s take refreshing. “Amen to that,” he says, “and, indeed, to the arguments that are sustained throughout ‘Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.’ You may disagree with them, fiercely so, but they could not be more persuasively put, and they rescue Vermeer from the shelf, as it were, on which we have placed him for our convenience.”  

Okay, fair enough. View of Delft is a great work of art. It can bear more than one interpretation. As for me, I prefer the aesthetic approach. A few years ago, Rebecca Mead wrote a piece on Vermeer. She says 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.” That is a beautiful sentence. You don’t need religion to appreciate Vermeer’s art, just an eye for exquisite light and color. 

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)