“One of the most intimate and quiet of painters, and one who often chose to work on an unusually small scale, Vermeer has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser.”

So writes Ruth Bernard Yeazell in the July 20 issue of the magazine, on the occasion of a recent show of at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum—the largest ever of Vermeer’s work, featuring twenty-eight of the thirty-seven paintings attributed to him—that sold out its entire four-month run of tickets in a few days. This paradox is all the more striking since, after Vermeer’s death in 1675, his “name largely vanished from accounts of Dutch painting in the centuries that followed, only to reappear—phoenix-like—when…Théophile Thoré devoted a three-part article to this ‘unknown of genius’” in 1866. Since Thoré’s rediscovery, Vermeer’s light-filled paintings of interiors, private moments, and seventeenth-century Delft have fascinated poets, painters, filmmakers, novelists, and novelists’ characters—Marcel Proust’s Bergotte spends “his dying moments admiring the ‘little patch of yellow wall’ in View of Delft.” “What keeps us looking,” Yeazell observes, “is what keeps us unsettled—caught between our surrender to illusion and our consciousness of the art that makes that illusion possible.”

Below, alongside Yeazell’s essay, we have collected six essays and one poem from our archives about Vermeer and his milieu.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Life Made Light

The twenty-eight Vermeer paintings assembled at the Rijksmuseum this year were a testament to how he is understood today: as an artist of the interior, a master of subjects at once alluring and enigmatic.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell
A Vermeer for the IRA

Rose Dugdale, famous for a 1974 art heist, would probably rather be remembered as a heroine of Irish republicanism.

Joseph Leo Koerner
First Among Equals

“Positioning the lacemaker so that we cannot see what she is sewing, Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

Julian Bell
The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

“All he can ascertain is visual sensations. Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring these from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.”

Sanford Schwartz
Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

John Updike
More Light on Delft

“The son of a bricklayer, Pieter de Hooch gives us the textures underfoot. The floor tiles, arrestingly smoothed to a pattern of alternating black and white in Vermeer, in de Hooch paintings wear their uneven glazing, their raised edges catching the light.”

Anthony Grafton
Vermeer’s Mystery Theater

“Vermeer reproduces, with dazzling facility, the bright light that pours through crystal-clean windows into shapely rooms, light that picks out the hard surfaces and elegant shapes of gleaming pewter and china vessels; the wrinkled, curling, richly detailed maps that turn white plaster into studies in design and texture; the thick-napped, precisely knotted rugs that transform ordinary tables into a feast of elegant forms and rich colors.”

Vermeer

a poem by
Wisława Szymborska

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.

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