NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I’ ve never been a Vermeer fan. I love his yellows and furs, his filtered light, and blessed hush. Alas, to me, his work’s an Old Master version of Hollywood’s women’s picture. Almost all of his figures are women. Not Mildred Pierce or Leave Her to Heaven or Scarlett O’Hara, where the women are hardly pastel, rarely quiet except when planning something sneaky and mean, and might be crazy, but Now, Voyager or To Each His Own, in which women contemplate convention and how to navigate it. Most of Vermeer’s women are passive, as in The Procuress, a surprising, early picture that shows a client pawing a prostitute’s bosom.

Vermeer’s women might likely be in a pickle but engage the pickle with diffidence. I’m not crazy about Remington, either, but, even-keeled as I am, am inclined to action. I like challenges, narrative, and dilemmas that can be solved or botched, and where time is of the essence. Nobody moves much in a Vermeer painting.

I’ll write two or three stories about the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition, which I saw in March after an art trip to Dresden and Berlin. Today, I’ll focus on the organization and look of the show, Vermeer’s biography, and four or five early paintings.

When I read that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was planning a retrospective of the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), I was skeptical and too cynical. The Rijksmuseum suffered badly from the reckless, useless Covid lockdowns. Closed for months, the museum saw its attendance, in 2022, stalled at 50 percent of its 2019 numbers, one of the limpest recoveries among marquee museums in Europe.

It needed, desperately, to juice tourism, and what better way than Vermeer? There hadn’t been a big Vermeer show since 1995, when the National Gallery retrospective brought 21 of what we then thought were 35 of his surviving paintings to Washington. There’d never been a comprehensive Vermeer exhibition before that.

Though dead since 1675, Vermeer was never entirely forgotten. He was seen as an accomplished Dutch genre painter, though of few paintings. Before the Washington show and Michael Montias’s 1989 Vermeer biography, Vermeer and His Milieu, Delft archives hadn’t been plumbed much. There’d never been a Vermeer survey.

We’re nearly 30 years past the Washington show. Was there much new about Vermeer? Here, my biases raised their ugly heads and tossed their curls like Bacchantes. No, I thought, there can’t be, and there really isn’t or at least not much. Why, I thought, jostle 28 Vermeers, only four of which belong to the Rijksmuseum and deprive their home museums of their treasures, for a money-making, tourist-boosting extravaganza? I’m very old-school. As a general proposition, art, especially delicate, iconic art, should stay safe and sound on the walls of the museum that owns it, unless there’s something new to say. Adored on its home turf, a painting is unlikely to have anything bad happen to it, unless home’s the Gardner Museum, whose Vermeer, Concert, got swiped in 1990.

Sometimes my cynicism and skepticism get the better of me. Vermeer is a lovely exhibition. The Rijksmuseum began working on the project long before the Covid crisis. It had never done a Vermeer-only show. I’d seen nearly all of the 37 paintings that scholars and conservators believe Vermeer did. Eleven, after all, are in American museums. Until I saw the Rijksmuseum exhibition, I’d never seen the two Dresden Vermeers.

Seeing them together is a revelation and very satisfying. Skeptic, cynic, and Methodist as I am, I’m in favor of giving people pleasure.

Vermeer is believed to have made 45 or so paintings, beginning with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, from 1654 or 1655, and ending, from 1670 to 1672, with a spurt of pictures of young women writing letters or playing a musical instrument.

His art is like being nuzzled by a purring cat. It’s warm and fuzzy, cryptic enough but acquiescent, engaging but not giving away much. A great work of art is companionable. Ruskin said that good art is one soul talking to another, but Vermeer is so reticent. Whatever sense it makes is the foggy logic of a dream.

We don’t know much about Vermeer. Insofar as the documentary evidence is concerned, he rowed through life with muffled oars, as did most everyone in his day. He was born in Delft in 1632. His father was a silk worker, an innkeeper, and an art dealer. It’s likely he went to school in a small academy in Delft. It’s also likely he served as an apprentice artist in Amsterdam, The Hague, or Utrecht. It’s most unlikely that he ever left Holland.

Though christened a Protestant, he married a Roman Catholic woman in 1653 and seems to have converted. They had 14 or 15 children, of whom eleven survived babyhood. This painter of rumination must have lived amid lots of noise. Siring so many kids shows a way with familiarity. It’s thought that one of the figures in The Procuress, a jolly man off to the side, is Vermeer’s self-portrait, but that’s an educated guess.

Like his father, he was an art dealer. He and his father had a good business. Middle-class people in Holland bought art to decorate their homes. Their homes were small, and, mostly, so was the art, but they acquired and had decent taste. No velvet Elvises for them. By the mid 1650s, he’s known as a painter. We know, more or less, the chronology of his paintings. He seems to have done one or two a year. At one point, he and his family lived next to a community of Jesuits who, since Jesuits meddle in everything, probably informed his work. His affluent mother-in-law also lived in Delft and helped the Vermeer family with money.

Vermeer was respected enough as a painter to be elected head of the Guild of St. Luke, the local artists’ professional association, in 1662. After the death of his mother in 1669, he seems to have inherited the family inn, which he rented. The building is on Delft’s main square. The family wasn’t rich but bourgeois. Vermeer was a member of the local civic guard, both a militia and a fraternal organization.

In 1659, he borrowed money from Pieter Claesz van Ruijven. He and his wife, Maria, appear to have acquired about half of Vermeer’s known paintings over his 22-year career. That Maria likely drove the family’s art patronage is a big, new discovery.

For all his local success as an artist, dealer, and civic leader, Vermeer died deep in debt in mid December 1675, possibly in an epidemic, after an illness of a couple of days. A war and a depression had shattered the Delft art market and Vermeer’s business as a painter and a dealer. We know that his widow settled her hefty, outstanding bill from the neighborhood bakery by giving up two Vermeer paintings.

Still, a few months after Vermeer’s death, his widow filed for bankruptcy. A court-appointed overseer inventoried the contents of the Vermeer home. The Rijksmuseum’s catalogue of Vermeer matches objects in the inventory with objects that Vermeer included in his paintings. This chapter of the catalogue is fascinating. I’m less a voyeur and more curious about the decoration of houses. The scholarly team that prepared the Rijksmuseum exhibition isn’t the first to study the inventory. The inventory essay is more of a reprise, and it clarifies, corrects, and tweaks previous looks at Vermeer’s home, studio, and possessions.

Vermeer has nine galleries arranged by theme, with a handful of paintings in each space. The art on view is Vermeer-only, which is a relief. For a tidy little place like Holland, its art history can be messy and distracting. Artists tended to specialize in narrow topics such as flowers, cows, ships, skies, kermesses, interiors, city views, and bar brawls. Vermeer didn’t emerge fully formed or work like a hermit. Delft had lots of artists, as did cities nearby, and Vermeer looked at their work. The city was also the seat of the House of Orange, the Netherlands’ de facto rulers, so it was a political center. Vermeer sticks with Vermeer. The exhibition might as well be called “Closer to Vermeer,” which is the title of the introductory gallery.

The sections cover Vermeer’s two cityscapes, which give us a sense of place, his big, early paintings, which are religious, as well as The Procuress, his early interiors, close-ups including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, from 1664 to 1667, and musical pictures. “Gentlemen Callers” is the closest thing to an action gallery since the men in the pictures seem to be rushing in or rushing out. The Geographer, Vermeer’s only surviving picture of a single male figure, gets its own gallery. The last gallery, showing Woman Holding a Balance, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, and Allegory of the Catholic Faith, considers vanity, a worldly value, and spirituality.

Gallery interpretation is minimal, what I call “things to look at” labels. Some bits are too technical. Green earth, a pigment used in Girl with a Red Hat, to create the right skin color, marks Vermeer as the only artist in the Netherlands using it in this way. Who cares? Some are very general, such as “Vermeer painted introverted figures throughout his career.” Some are tangential, like the similarity between the clothes women wear in two different pictures.

I enjoyed the catalogue, which is intense, and wish some of its new discoveries were included in the gallery labels. Curators, pushed by museum educators and marketing people, now tend to believe that incisive, new scholarship is over the public’s head. In Vermeer, the labels are almost entirely descriptive. I profess to hate being bossy — actually, I love it — but curators might need a mandated “where’s the beef” panel noting an exhibition’s new findings.

There’s lots of empty space between paintings. This is, in part, a function of having only 28 objects, some small, in a big temporary exhibition suite. Vermeer wants us to look closely and, in keeping with the spirit of the art, to contemplate. The galleries are alternately painted red, green, and blue, sublimely saturated, dark but not funereal. Here and there, there are color-coordinated, floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains. These both soften and enrich the empty spaces and manage to evoke both a chapel and a boudoir. I think that’s brilliant — it provokes us to think of Vermeer’s thematic layers.

The most gobsmacking part of Vermeer is his early paintings. I see why the curators started the exhibition with the two city scenes. Starting with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha or The Procuress or Saint Praxides would have left visitors wondering whether they’d come to the wrong gallery. The art’s juvenilia, which I crave, along with art done by a great artist anticipating death. In very early art, and Vermeer was barely 20 when he painted these and Diana and Her Companions, I look for the seeds of brilliance. In late art, such as Titian’s in the 1570s or Winslow Homer’s after 1900, we look for visual valedictory. That’s the essential, damn the critics and the patrons. Vermeer, who died after a two-day illness at 43, didn’t have a valedictory, but he definitely had a matriculation.

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha is Vermeer’s earliest painting, we think. Vermeer signed it, we think again, but his signature wasn’t discovered until 1901. It’s 5-by-4.5 feet, so it’s big. The catalogue unpeels the picture twice, though the exhibition doesn’t. First, the catalogue suggests that Vermeer apprenticed as an artist in Utrecht, where work by Hendrick ter Brugghen points to Vermeer’s treatment of light, or in The Hague. There, Vermeer saw Van Dyke’s work, which inspired his handling of paint.

Second, in Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Vermeer struggled with space and never conquered it — two ambiguous spaces pierce the left wall. Behind Mary, is there a closed door? Even at the end of his life, he stuck with two walls and rarely showed ceilings. He proposed outside spaces through open windows but only twice painted an adjacent room.

I don’t think Vermeer painted Saint Praxedis unless someone both twisted his arm and gave him explicit instructions. Goodness, she’s sopping up the blood of a martyr. That’s something the bourgeois Vermeer, who, let’s say, converted to Roman Catholicism in the mid 1650s, might still have considered work for the hired help, who aren’t canonized for cleaning the house.

A signature on the picture reading “Meer” was discovered in 1969. Not to be a rat, but Michael Kitson, the English scholar who first attributed the picture to Vermeer, told me at a lobster bake in the mid ’90s in Branford, near New Haven, that he might have had a surfeit of gin when he wrote that Vermeer painted it. I’d just seen the exhibition at the National Gallery and asked him whether or not he still thought Vermeer had done it. I was a Yale graduate student then, precocious but not an acolyte. He might have had a surfeit of gin when he told me that Vermeer didn’t paint it. A teetotaler then and now, I’ll report what he said and my own choice of lemonade as a beverage. No one believed in 1995 anything that he, she, or it had said in 1969.

I’d never seen The Procuress before. It’s signed by Vermeer and dated 1656. That doesn’t mean much, and it didn’t look anything like Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. I’d like to see the provenance of The Procuress, a titty picture, and Diana and Her Companions, which is a dodgy Vermeer. The two seem very unlikely. Old Master scholars build on past generations and don’t care to dispute them, which would sully those who are still alive and sitting on awards committees and those in the grave, who might haunt.