Vermeer's world.(Critical Essay)

Vermeer mesmerizes. His paintings cast a spell on present-day audiences, so much so that when a strike disrupted bookings for the comprehensive exhibition of his work at the National Gallery, Washington, five years ago hordes of hardy art lovers lined up before dawn in bitter February weather for a chance to enter. This spring they have been crowding around Vermeer's paintings in preference to almost anything else in the Metropolitan Museum's ambitious survey of the context that formed him and in which he worked, "Vermeer and the Delft School."(1) "It's easy to tell where the Vermeers are in any of the galleries" a young artist reported to me. "You just go to where there are twenty people in front of a painting."

That's no casual choice. There have been complaints that the exhibition is not exclusively devoted to Vermeer, mostly from those immune to the charms of the luxury items--tapestries, elaborate gold and silver objects, portraits of the ruling classes, and the occasional elaborately painted tile--included to establish that the city, despite its size, was wealthy and sophisticated in the seventeenth century. (But how could anyone resist an ensemble of elaborate tapestry horse-trappings, neatly tied on the shoulder, which puts anything at Hermes to shame?) Others have expressed their limited tolerance for the large numbers of church interiors (many depicting the Delft Nieuwe Kirk's glory, the tomb of William the Silent, the assassinated martyr of Dutch resistance to Spanish rule) despite the fine improvisations on pale geometric forms in the best of them and the amusing anecdotal inclusions in almost all. (Seventeenth-century dogs had the run of Dutch churches and according to the paintings, at least, abused the privilege.) There is a perhaps excessive number of images of the city, in prints, drawings, and paintings, though admittedly all good examples and interesting enough in isolation. At least one work, Daniel Vosmaer's limpid view, The Harbor of Delft (c. 1658-60, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico), requires no justification beyond its merits as a painting, and cumulatively the selection sets the stage by conjuring up the streets and the exteriors of those white church interiors and the houses in which Vermeer's pensive women tune their lutes, read their letters, and admire their necklaces. Yet it is hard to avoid thinking that the painter's regrettably absent iconic view of his home town would have made the point more economically and more satisfyingly.

But these are quibbles. "Vermeer and the School of Delft" brings together a splendid selection of works that allows us to see this most enigmatic of painters not as a unique figure, but as a member of a community of artists in the prosperous little city where he spent his working life. The assembly of Vermeers is impressive--almost half of his surviving thirty-odd works, some of them rarely seen away from the museums that house them, a few not included in the Washington show. But many of Vermeer's most celebrated colleagues are represented no less impressively. The exhibition includes, for example, lively drawings by Paulus Potter--best known for his paintings of large, contemplative cows--done during his short sojourn in Delft, an ample group of Pieter De Hooch's best domestic scenes and streetscapes, and a truly astonishing number of the few extant works of Card Fabritius, the superbly gifted pupil of Rembrandt--apparently a crucial influence on the young Vermeer--who died young and tragically. For Vermeer to dominate the field in such company is a clear indicator of the hold he exerts on the viewer's imagination.

Why is this? Partly because his best pictures are, quite simply, so wonderful and partly, I suspect, because they are so convincing and seemingly so transparent. Each of his intimate, meticulously crafted images appears to be a window into a miniature world at once wholly artificial and wholly real. Vermeer's preternaturally ordered, silent interiors are like subliminal demonstrations of an ideal, otherworldly geometry; ordinary furnishings have magically assumed a perfectly harmonious relationship to their setting, to everything else in the picture and to the shape and proportions of the canvas itself. (That perfect harmony makes it especially startling to learn that Vermeer and his wife raised eleven children in the house in which he lived and painted; perhaps that's why, unlike most of his colleagues, he produced so few pictures--scholars estimate that the surviving works represent about three-quarters of his total oeuvre--although the fact that his wife was a wealthy woman may have also been a factor, since it lessened his need to make work in order to earn his living.)

Perhaps it is the underlying tension between artifice and actuality (despite the effect of harmoniousness) that makes Vermeer's best pictures so compelling. They are clearly made of blocky strokes of pigment, and yet they vividly evoke our visual and tactile experience of the everyday world: its textures, the character of its inanimate objects, and above all the particulars of its light and its spaces. Like Velazquez a generation earlier, Vermeer never gets a tone wrong; the best of his mysterious pictures conjure up specific times of day, temperatures, and seasons, from the chilly gloom of a brief, Northern winter afternoon to the pale radiance of a spring morning. He allows us to become the unseen observers of a continuous, uneventful present, turns us into witnesses to the quiet domestic rituals enacted within spaces we begin to find familiar: a room lit by tall windows on our left, with geometric tile floors and pale plaster walls hung with maps and paintings. The furnishings vary slightly, from picture to picture, as do certain details--the floor patterns, window mullions, and the tiles that sometimes appear at the base of the wall --but we begin to recognize a particular tapestry curtain or a set of chairs with lion finials. It all seems utterly peaceful and hermetic. Time moves slowly, as though its inexorable progression were somehow held in check by the firm verticals and horizontals of Vermeer's compositions. Yet this disciplined pictorial framework is softened, blurred (metaphorically, at times literally) by nearly palpable sheets of light. Nothing of great significance seems to be happening. Whatever drama there is hinges on the contents of a letter or a reaction to a proffered glass of wine.

Vermeer's world appears to be entirely domestic, but that impression quickly evaporates. We don't need to know very much about the conventions of seventeenth-century painting to realize that there is often more implied. If we look attentively at the details of the seemingly anecdotal furnishings of the room, a picture of a woman weighing gold--a miracle of cool gray-blue planes and masses--starts to take on a moral message about vanity, for example. At the same time, it all seems so specific, so faithful to perception, that we become certain that Vermeer is permitting us a glimpse into his reality, that he is presenting us with a faithful record of something that he has scrutinized. Yet the more intently we look, the more unreal it all becomes. Not only do we realize that Vermeer's pictorial structures are so idealized as to verge on abstraction (no, he is not a modernist ahead of his time), but we also become aware of strange discrepancies of scale and inexplicably abrupt shifts in spatial relationships that hint at reliance not on acute observation, but on some intermediary optical device. Paint declares itself almost independently of what it alludes to, in little flickers and patches that are intensely evocative of the play of light on particular surfaces without in any way describing them literally. (That's part of why the Impressionists found Vermeer so exciting when he was rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century by the French critic Thore-Burger).

The exhibition at the Met makes clear that Vermeer was very much a man of his time. Each of his pictures in the show is presented among related works by his peers. The first Vermeer we encounter, an early effort completed about the time the twenty-one-year-old artist joined the painter's guild in Delft, is the radiant Diana and Her Companions (c. 1653-54, Mauritshuis, The Hague), hung in the company of works by earlier Delft painters documenting the entire range of subject matter popular at the time: portraits (including a stiff group portrait of an anatomical demonstration that reminds us forcibly of Rembrandt's genius in transforming the genre), religious scenes, church interiors, views of the city and its environs, and so on. Diana was a common motif of the period, it seems, but the luminosity of Vermeer's painting and its subtle modelling of form seem very much his own. So does the ampleness and four-square architectonic massing of the large-scale figures, the heft of their bodies beneath the silky fabrics. There are some mild infelicities of drawing and proportion, but they seem inconsequential. What transforms the picture--seeming to prefigure Vermeer's mature work--is a sense of a private moment observed, of an ordinary event--even among immortals--glimpsed unawares. The absorbed young women in the group turn away from us. One kneels to sponge the feet of the goddess, another studies the sole of her own foot; all seem lost in thought, silent. With the luxury of knowing what was to come, we can see this early mythological scene as prefiguring the motifs with which Vermeer is most closely associated, the domestic interiors populated by introspective women.