NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE L ast week I wrote about Vermeer, now on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. No one’s surprised it’s a blockbuster. Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) painted around 45 works, and only 38 are still with us. Almost all are in museums. The Rijksmuseum gathered 28, though Girl with a Pearl Earring, from the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, left the show early, so then there were 27. Still, it’s the biggest Vermeer exhibition ever. The last survey of Vermeer’s work — and Vermeer is 100 percent, pure Vermeer — happened in 1995.

Vermeer’s small, quiet, enigmatic pictures are both loved and famous. The Milkmaid, from 1658 or 1659, is the stuff of a cloister. A servant pours milk in a bowl on a table with bread in baskets and what’s probably as pitcher of beer. She’s hefty, and the wall behind her, deceptively minimalist, is expansive. It’s empty space that demands our attention. Sometimes women in his paintings play music. In Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, from 1662 or so, and Mistress and Maid, from a few years later, the mail has come. There’s urgency and drama, but we don’t know what.

Here and there, a man visits. In a couple of paintings, a scientist works. Vermeer gives us clues, some obvious, such as a giant painting of Cupid in the background, some less so, as in The Love Letter, from around 1669, where the action, what little there is, occurs in another room, or a map on the wall, or a window with leaded, stained glass. Vermeer’s windows admit light that’s revealing but not too much so. His light is soft and discreet.

One of the striking things for me is the incongruity between Vermeer’s early, mid-1650s work — a couple of straight religious pictures, Diana and Her Companions, and The Procuress, a brothel picture — and The Milkmaid and Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, both from the late 1650s.

Vermeer seems to have suddenly clicked on a formula leading him to a perfect illusion of space. Girl Reading a Letter is lovely and the more complicated of the two. It’s an indoor/outdoor picture, which is tricky, with, in the foreground, an Oriental rug and still life of fruit. It’s got not one but two dramatic curtains and a human figure. There’s a lot happening, but Vermeer seems to have organized the figures and the story by using, almost entirely, horizontal and vertical elements. A three-dimensional green curtain conveys revelation, as does the red curtain draped over the open window, admitting unfiltered light. We like drama.

When Girl Reading a Letter was cleaned in preparation for Vermeer, curators and conservators made an astonishing discovery. Covered in white overpaint applied after Vermeer’s death and undetected until now was a massive, sassy, in-your-face painting of Cupid that dwarfs the woman reading the letter. He stamps on two face masks, a sign of deception.

Even in Vermeer studies, with more prospectors for new nuggets than a gold rush, surprises like this come rarely.

Last week, I wrote only a bit about the beginning of Vermeer. The curators made the right choice in starting the exhibition with The Little Street, from 1658 or so, and View of Delft, from 1660. They’re both well known, and The Little Street is co charming. They give Vermeer a sense of place, since Delft was his home more or less for his entire life. In an otherwise chronological show, using these two solves the problem of starting with four early Vermeers, which I wouldn’t call clunkers but are so uncharacteristic that dingbats might think they’ve gotten lost.

A catalogue essay by Pieter Roelofs, the curator along with Gregor Weber, treats Vermeer and the cityscape. Vermeer was a homebody, a man with 14 children who lived in the very center of Delft, a prosperous city made more so by the Peace of Munster in 1648. Then years of war with Spain ended, and the Dutch Republic was born.

These two pictures are anomalies for Vermeer since, after he painted them, he did only interiors and possibly one other view of Delft, now lost. Scholars have traced the location, they think, based on taxes on quays and also the name of the alleyway — Tripe Gate — linking an adjacent house to Vermeer’s aunt, who sold tripe. Tripe or no tripe, it’s the kind of middle-class house in which Vermeer lived. A good part of everyday life, especially with a dozen or more kids, happened on the front stoop and the sidewalk. It’s an unusual scene of everyday life that’s not posh, either. Vermeer’s women are usually more likely to wear ermine, not sackcloth.

This brings me, circuitously, to the Delft Thunderclap. On October 12, 1654, a Delft warehouse used by the Dutch army to store gunpowder exploded. Close to 100,000 pounds detonated, destroying a quarter of the city. Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), a Delft artist still thought to be one of Rembrandt’s prize students, was killed, as were hundreds of others. It would have been far worse had October 12 not been a market day. People weren’t home but hitting the mall. View of Delft edits damage to the center of the city, which took years to restore.

Was Vermeer’s choice of secluded, elegant interiors spurred by the Delft Thunderclap? Would a trauma like this have influenced taste? We can’t know, but the tranquility of his spaces and the importance of music could have had less likely sources. Disaster in Vermeer’s time was a fact of life as well as a show of God’s wrath. And as calm as they are, his pictures often present a moment when things change fast, either through a new baby, a letter with unwanted news, or a visit from a fashionable intruder — otherwise called a dude.

I had only a day in Amsterdam and needed to get home, but readers going to the Kingdom of the Low Countries to see Vermeer ought to hitch up their wooden shoes and visit the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague for Vrel, Forerunner of Vermeer.

Poor Jacobus Vrel (active 1640 to 1660) is getting his moment in the cloudy Dutch sky though a retrospective at the Mauritshuis and in the shadow of Vermeer. I haven’t seen the exhibition, alas, but I was curious enough to read the catalogue since so many Dutch art-specialist friends told me that “he’s better than Vermeer.”

High praise, and likely tinged with envy over the Rijksmuseum’s smashing Vermeer success, but Vrel’s very, very good. His street pictures, interiors with reading figures, and indoor/outdoor scenes are cryptic, as are Vermeer’s, and we know Vrel did them before Vermeer. Vermeer’s situations are more haute-bourgeois, and his light and textures are softer. Vermeer didn’t swipe ideas from Vrel, but he knew the artist community. Vrel informs him, the show at the Mauritshuis says. Its curators believe it so much that they have taken Girl with a Pearl Earring, which the Mauritshuis owns, back from Vermeer to display it in the Vrel show. The Mauritshuis’s other Vermeers are staying in Amsterdam for the run of Vermeer.

The Mauritshuis wouldn’t have done this if its curators had thought that Girl with a Pearl Earring would blow Vrel’s work into the North Sea and beyond.

Vrel’s a phantom artist. The Mauritshuis curators think he came from Zwolle, not far from Delft, but we know next to nothing about him. His paper trail makes Vermeer’s look like the Manhattan phone book. Technology has been indispensable in learning what he did. The Vrel exhibition goes to the Fondation Custodia in Paris this summer. I wrote about this perfect, small museum and research center last year. It does exquisite connoisseurship shows. It’s the best museum in Paris that no one knows.

I’ll write more about Vermeer on Saturday, on gals with pearls and red hats, astronomers and geographers, the Catholic faith, and the art of painting.