What's so special about Vermeer?

I went to the world's largest Vermeer exhibit in Amsterdam in May. Was it all it was cracked up to be?

(Caption: “The Wine Glass,” Johannes Vermeer, ca. 1658-1660. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

(NB: I’m sharing some old writing that never got published. I hope you’ll enjoy!)

The Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition was hailed as ground-breaking, earth-shattering, life-changing, and aspiring visitors certainly took note.  By the exhibition’s second day, all its tickets were sold out. (The museum eventually opened up two other rounds of tickets, which, promptly and unsurprisingly, again sold out.) 

I myself had to buy tickets to the show on the secret art market, otherwise known as the Dutch version of eBay. Press tickets I could not secure—I was told they were all used up. I messaged my eventual ticket seller in Google-translated Dutch, telling him it was “my dream” to see the exhibit and asking him to agree to a lower fee for the tickets. That lower price was 110 euro, still a cool 80 euro more than the regular going rate. But I counted myself among the lucky outliers—a pair of tickets on eBay went for as much as $2,724 in late March, according to Hyperallergic. Others closed in the low $1,000 range. 

Perhaps the rabid fascination for the show came from its sheer implausibility. Only 37 paintings in total are attributed to the Dutch artist, per the Rijksmuseum. The exhibit featured 27 of them, said to be the largest collection of Vermeer’s paintings in one place. The last time a show of this magnitude had been put together was 1995, at Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. 

The rarity of the exhibit was clear, but that couldn’t have been enough to draw these kinds of crowds. So what is it that makes us still stand captivated in front of Vermeer’s quiet domestic interior scenes, rendered motionless by each quotidian detail? We might focus on the gauzy white hood of a woman, her face illuminated by the window’s light, the steady flow of milk as it is poured from a pitcher, the opulent blue of a woman’s jacket as she turns her face down to read a letter in the morning. Is it a romantic note from a lover or a missive bearing bad news of some kind?

It is this mystery that permeates each Vermeer, and there are many questions the show leaves unanswered—and even unasked. The exhibit is organized both chronologically and thematically. Some of the artist’s most surprising works are early landscape scenes from Delft, the town in which his life began and ended. Glimmerings of his later portraits are evident in his 1658 painting, “View of Houses in Delft,” in which a snapshot of brick-faced houses reveals the hidden domestic life behind their doorways, a woman at needlepoint here, a woman sweeping there. Other exhibition rooms draw on the imagery in Vermeer’s scenes: a gaze out the window, a letter in the act of being written, a map that hangs above a conversation between a girl and an officer. The figures in Vermeer’s paintings generally go unnamed—they could represent any one of us, and yet they do not.

But, above all, what clearly unites Vermeer’s limited number of works is their composition. The intimate paintings he is known for seem all to take place within the same room, as if the artist had a dollhouse in which he simply switched out figures. The window is almost always at stage left, sometimes an object used simply to light the space, sometimes cracked open, sometimes ordained with glass decoration and sometimes just implied. The walls are starkly neutral and the rooms are often richly decorated. But each one is laid out in much the same way. What a revolutionary act: to keep one thing constant, as if in an experiment, and watch the other, changing variables become more clear in the process.

The paintings may reveal themselves to us little by little, but the artist is likely destined to remain in part a mystery. At the very end of the show comes—perhaps finally—a full timeline of Vermeer’s life. The painter died at 43 “from an unknown illness lasting a day and a half.” He left his wife and eleven children “penniless with a large debt.” His wife, Catharina, was forced to “settle a bill of over 600 guilders at the baker’s in exchange for” two of the artist’s works, The Guitar Player and Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid. Unlike an artist like Van Gogh, who never achieved commercial success in his lifetime, Vermeer fell in the in-between — he was a member of the Saint Luke’s Guild, an organization for artists, “a respected artist his entire life,” according to the National Gallery of Art, and may have even maintained a studio. Not long before his marriage, he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, a move that may have been meant to placate his wife’s Catholic family. Yet so much of what we know about Vermeer are mere facts: we have to speculate as to their meaning. 

As I left the exhibit, I found myself actually nursing a tinge of disappointment. Perhaps it was the swell of anticipation I had felt before the show, the expectation that this exhibit might actually change my life, leave me a different person exiting than I had been entering it. I waded through the gift shop, wondering what small trinket I might be able to fit into my Wizz-Air-mandated carry-on backpack. After all, I couldn’t afford both an overhead bag and a Vermeer ticket. I chose four postcards of paintings I had liked and threw them in a Rijksmuseum tote. 

Afterwards, I searched endlessly for more insight into the artist’s life, but there simply isn’t much to find. Even author Tracy Chevalier, who wrote the novel “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” based on the artist’s painting, was forced to rely heavily on one document: an inventory of objects in Vermeer’s Delft home compiled shortly after his death. The list includes a painting by Fabritius, an ebony crucifix and multiple canvases. 

The show itself doesn’t leave Vermeer any more known to us than he was before. Yet as I resumed once more my daily life, my mind returned again and again to those domestic portraits, figures etched so deeply in my psyche that they might have been real. I thought of the lush fabrics, the play of light, the barely legible facial expressions and that window in the left foreground, the one facet that seemed to remain unchanged. (So powerful is this light that Vogue’s Liam Hess was convinced to have found it at an Amsterdam café.)

Upon my return to Rome, I taped the postcards to the wall above my desk in a haphazard fashion, unintentionally cropping the edges with bits of brown tape. Every so often, I look at them as I write. I feel myself transported back to the exhibition, as if I were still clamoring past Dutch businessmen and older couples to get a closer glimpse. I see now that it is in the lingering after-effects that the exhibit has changed me, that even a postcard of Vermeer’s work taped on a Roman apartment wall can still take us somewhere new.