There is no painter more Dutch than Vermeer. The other greats? Most casual viewers think Rembrandt was Italian (I did for embarrassingly long). And Van Gogh is far too French-adjacent (despite all those early peasant paintings). And beyond that? There’s Mondrian and Bosch and a sea of long-dead Jan and Frans and Hans named painters. But the national imagination and artistic reputation rests in outsized part upon Vermeer and his slim thirty-six surviving works.
A painter of middle class domestic spaces and the women who inhabited them, he is of course most famous for his “tronie” style portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her face stares out at you from a hundred Amsterdam souvenir shops. Right next to the windmill magnets and the clog keychains. Like the scent of weed, she drifts throughout the cityscape. Inescapable. Elusive.
One of the most famous faces in art, there’s a reason she’s referred to as the “Mona Lisa of the North.” But more on that particular story another day…
But The Girl is a bit of an anomaly in Vermeer’s oeuvre, despite her immense contribution to it. Vermeer infamously played with the gaze but was rarely so direct with it. While some of his figures do look at the viewer – interrupted in mid-act, mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-flirtation – the direct, perceiving gaze of The Girl is a bit of a rarity in Vermeer’s work. More frequently, he positions us, the viewer, in the role of voyeur; watching women in their personal moments of self reflection and interaction. We see them drinking, conversing, reading, writing, playing music, but generally we are not included in these acts. As silent and passive witnesses to their quietude, our presence is bought with the art patron’s coin. A currency outside the usual economies of the private family space.
This familiar and familial painting style – colloquially known as genre painting – represented a huge departure from the suffering Christs, self-aggrandizing patron portraits, and quaint landscapes of other European masters. A staple of the Dutch Golden Era, genre paintings were created all over the Low Countries, but few examples are as captivating as the intimate simplicity of Vermeer’s women.
The art historian Lawrence Gowing would even go so far as to christen a subset of Vermeer’s genre paintings “the pearl pictures” for their similar compositions and enigmatic, individual beauty. He would hold these paintings - each depicting a single woman at a large table facing towards a left-hand window while engaging in some discreet activity – as the pinnacle of the artform.
“The lady of the pearl pictures inherits a rich accumulation of meaning. Sometimes it seems that half the imagery of the genre tradition hangs about her, invisible.” - Lawrence Gowring, Vermeer, Oakland CA: University of California Press, 1997
Within this strict compositional guideline we see a visual language distilled to its purest qualities, to the interplay of light and color and melancholy detachment. “Yet she is usually alone, waited on only by the light. Daylight, the window itself, is indeed a presence in the room.”
As an immigrant to the Netherlands, studying Vermeer is part of how I’m artistically acclimating to my new country. Learning the stories and brushstrokes that make up Dutch art history. But my love for Vermeer runs deeper than mere historical relevance. I am also drawn to the solitude and sense of quiet containment in his subject matter – and how this reflects my own experience of being female and restarting life in a new country.
There are days where I’ll be working in my studio or tending to my house and I’ll catch a glimpse of a familiar posture or gesture or expression – familiar because I’ve seen them depicted in the dozen Dutch art history books cluttering my coffee table. The resemblance is uncanny because the emotional component is uncanny. I love the Netherlands, but the nest I’ve carved out for myself here is lined with a deep solitariness. Which is different from solitude, mind you. There is none of the emptiness, the unhappiness. Just quiet. The quiet of an art studio and a garden. Of tea kettles and chicken coops and sun-drenched naps. Of owning too many cats and not having enough local friends.
Vermeer’s is an art of everyday intimacies, single film cells clipped from the reel of time, left scattered across the floor, as relatable now as they were in the 1650’s. I'm excited to share my artistic and intellectual journey through his work. To share what that work has meant to me on my immigration journey.