Volume 43, Number 1 · January 11, 1996
Vermeer's Mystery Theater
By Anthony Grafton
Johannes Vermeer 12, 1995-February 11, 1996
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, November
Johannes Vermeer Hague/ Yale University Press
catalog of the exhibition edited by Arthur K. Jr. Wheelock
National Gallery of Art/ Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The, 229 pp., $45.00
Vermeer both enchants and provokes. His art, as the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga wrote long ago, 'transcends all technical categories' and 'humbles all the precepts of aesthetics.' On first encounter he looks like a painter of everyday life, one who recorded in detail of almost hallucinatory precision the homely life of prosperous, scrubbed Dutch families in the seventeenth-century heyday of their Republic. His subjects also seem everyday, exemplary only in their ordinariness: 'He will show you a man,' Huizinga wrote, 'or preferably a woman, doing the simplest task, in simple surroundings, with loving care, reading a letter, pouring milk from a jug or waiting for a boat to arrive.'[1]
Review, 5182 words
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