Extraordinary Ordinary
Detail from Johannes Vermeer's 'The Lacemaker' (ca. 1669-70)
In the world of art, Johannes Vermeer is a name to conjure with, and any exhibition of his work qualifies as a blockbuster. For the first time since 1996, a major exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries is coming to the National Gallery of Art. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting debuted at the Louvre in Paris and then moved to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, where I saw it in August. As often happens in traveling exhibitions, six of the paintings displayed in Dublin will not make it to Washington, but nine new paintings will be added. And never fear: The 10 Vermeers shown in Dublin will all be on display in D.C., and that amounts to a substantial portion of his total output (roughly 34 authenticated paintings).
The exhibition includes such famous examples of Vermeer’s art as Woman with a Pearl Necklace, The Lacemaker, and, one of my personal favorites, The Astronomer. The exhibition includes 56 paintings by other artists, such as Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, and Jan Steen. These painters are so good that the exhibition would be well worth seeing even without the Vermeers, but his masterpieces obviously elevate the show to a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity.
Aside from the sheer quality of the paintings, the exhibition is distinguished by the intelligence with which they are organized. This is a case where the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts. The exhibition has a thesis and it governs the way the paintings are positioned. They are not divided by artist or arranged chronologically. Rather, they are grouped by subject matter—people writing or reading letters, people playing or listening to musical instruments, people with pet birds, and so on. This may sound like pure pedantry, but this arrangement turns out to reveal something important about art. We see how a cohort of talented painters, focusing on the same subjects, learned from each other, and especially how their rivalry raised the level of their game as artists.
The rationale behind the exhibition is developed in the catalogue that accompanies it, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, published by Yale University Press and edited by Adriaan Waiboer, head curator of the National Gallery of Ireland. The book includes color reproductions of all the paintings displayed in Paris, Dublin, and Washington, and the essays are informative and illuminating. They are learned but readable, and mercifully free of academic jargon. The title of the essay by Eric Jan Sluijter, “Emulative Imitation Among High-Life Genre Painters,” sums up the thesis of the exhibition and the catalogue. These painters did not work in Olympian isolation. Down in the trenches of the Dutch art market, they battled it out for commercial success, taking motifs from their rivals (dare I say “stealing”?) and giving them new twists. The aim was to achieve what Franciscus Junius, a 17th-century art theorist, called “dissimilar similarity.”
The Vermeer exhibition thus provides an effective counterweight to the way art has often been sold to the general public—namely as the work of solitary creators. Nineteenth-century Romantics came up with the myth of the lonely, misunderstood genius, oblivious to the marketplace and wrapped up in his own private vision of the world. Going into the 19th century, artists were still thought of as craftsmen, delivering a product to please paying customers and integrated into a guild of fellow artists. By contrast, the Romantics, as a revolutionary generation themselves, celebrated the painter as rebel, breaking with tradition and setting out in uncharted waters to create an artistic world of his own.
Thinking of art as self-expression, not craft, the Romantics often concocted imaginary spiritual biographies for past artists to bring them in line with the new 19th-century notion of painting as confessional. Every artist had to have his own story, preferably involving misunderstanding, rejection, persecution—some form of suffering. To this day most people are Romantics in their understanding of painting. Taking van Gogh as our model, we want to think of the artist as tortured, maybe even a bit mad. At the very least, his vocation should cost him an ear. God forbid he should be a businessman, let alone a successful one.
Vermeer did not acquire his reputation as one of the great masters until the second half of the 19th century, when the Romantic idea of genius had triumphed. And it was very easy to romanticize Vermeer. Given his small output as a painter, the initial lack of facts about his biography, and the way his career was largely confined to the small town of Delft, he could readily be pictured on the Romantic model of the isolated genius. In the popular imagination Vermeer might as well have been living in a garret in Paris, starving, while devoting himself priest-like to the cause of High Art.
As appealing as this image of Vermeer may be, it ignores the fact that he inherited an art dealership from his father and throughout his life bought and sold paintings as well as creating them. He was thus very aware of trends in the burgeoning art market in the Netherlands in the 17th century. We like to think of Woman with a Pearl Necklace as a miracle of creativity, springing spontaneously from Vermeer’s head like Athena from Zeus’. But viewing the D.C. exhibition, you will see that this celebrated painting may well have developed out of what we would today call a meme circulating among Dutch artists, represented by such works as Gerard ter Borch’s Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid, Caspar Netscher’s Woman at Her Toilet, Jan Steen’s Young Woman with a Letter, and Frans van Mieris’s Woman Before a Mirror. We think of Vermeer as deriving his inspiration directly from the world he lived in, copying objects right in front of his eyes. This exhibition shows that Vermeer always had one eye trained on his contemporaries’ work, and he learned to paint by copying other painters, not just the real world.
'The Astronomer' by Johannes Vermeer (1668) (CREDIT: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
None of this in any way diminishes Vermeer’s greatness as a painter. If anything, it should enhance our appreciation of his art. The other paintings serve as foils to highlight what sets Vermeer apart. Ignore all the labels and you will still have no problem picking out the Vermeers in this exhibition. Of the 66 paintings, the 10 best are unquestionably the Vermeers. They have a unique luminosity and superior composition of their elements, they are unequaled in the richness and subtlety of their colors and textures, and, above all, they have a psychological depth lacking in almost all the other paintings. At their most conventional, some of the other paintings veer toward the cartoonish, whereas Vermeer never offers less than complex human beings. The way he paints his figures, especially the women, we seem to be peering into their souls. Whereas the other painters generally present us with obvious and readily comprehensible situations, Vermeer leaves us wondering: “What’s happening here? What are these people thinking?”
This exhibition is, then, testimony to Vermeer’s uniqueness as a painter, but if he stands out among his contemporaries in terms of quality, that does not mean that he worked in isolation from them. And to be fair to Vermeer, with several of these paired paintings, it is hard to tell whether Vermeer was influenced by the other artist or he was influenced by Vermeer. As a result, this exhibition does a wonderful job of conveying a sense of the incredible breadth and depth of artistic talent in the Netherlands in the 17th century. My favorites among the subordinate cast are Gerrit Dou and Gabriel Metsu—both of whom fully justified solo exhibitions of their work at the National Gallery in past years (2000 and 2011, respectively).
'Astronomer by Candlelight' by Gerrit Dou (ca. 1665) (CREDIT: RMN / Grand Palais, Musée du Louvre / Franck Aux)
The exhibition is also a good reminder of the vagaries of artistic reputation. When Vermeer was all but forgotten in the 18th century, Gerrit Dou was riding high, widely viewed as one of the greatest of the Dutch masters, equal if not superior to his teacher—someone named Rembrandt. (Already in the 17th century, Dou’s reputation was such that he commanded the highest prices for his paintings of all the artists in the exhibition, including Vermeer.) In the second half of the 19th century, Dou’s star fell, even as those of Rembrandt and Vermeer rose, to the point where Dou was all but forgotten in the first half of the 20th century. As this exhibition documents, Dou deserves to be better known among the general art public. Of all the pairings in the exhibition, Dou comes closest to equaling Vermeer’s achievement in the juxtaposition of his two Astronomer by Candlelight paintings with Vermeer’s The Astronomer and The Geographer. Thanks to Dou’s deployment of candlelight illumination à la Georges de La Tour, for once we see a painter conveying as much inner spirituality as Vermeer does.
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The Romantics claimed that commerce is incompatible with culture: The genuine artist must turn his back on the marketplace and his contemporaries, and follow the inner light of his personal vision. Although many artists have achieved greatness by pursuing this route, the Vermeer exhibition serves as an important corrective to this one-sided conception of art by insisting that aesthetic progress may grow out of a community of competitive individuals, spurring each other to new heights of artistic achievement. In the supposedly rarefied world of painting, the story of Vermeer and his rivals is a tribute to what (relatively) free markets can accomplish (the guilds restricted trade in paintings among the Dutch cities). For the Dutch, the spirituality of art turns out to be rooted in the materiality of the marketplace.
We tend to forget how important the 17th-century Dutch Republic was in the development of capitalist civilization. In many ways, the Netherlands was ahead of Britain in this process. Amsterdam had a stock market before London did. The material wealth accumulated by Dutch merchants and manufacturers created a broader market for paintings than had ever existed before. Traditionally artists had depended on the church and the aristocracy for patronage. In the Netherlands in the 17th century, painters found they could sell their works to increasingly wealthy middle-class customers eager to adorn their homes and display their cultivated taste. Not surprisingly, the emergence of a multitude of middle-class patrons of art attracted talented people to painting, and they began to flood the market with landscapes, portraits, and the kind of genre paintings featured in the Vermeer exhibition.
It is no accident that what we call genre painting flourished in the Netherlands in the 17th century. These paintings offer glimpses into the daily lives of upper-middle-class people. They show women engaged in everyday household activities, like making lace or preparing food. They picture the middle class enjoying the new luxury of musical concerts at home (imagine the thrill of having your own harpsichord in your living room—the subject of several of these paintings). Above all, these paintings reveal the ups and downs of romantic affairs. They feature men courting women, lovers communicating in the face of absence, lovers suffering the pangs of anticipation and of rejection, and so on. For the first time, a broad segment of the middle class could afford paintings and what it evidently wanted in art was a mirror of its own middle-class way of life. As evidence of the new Dutch vogue for artistically decorating the home, roughly one-third of the works in the catalogue feature paintings hanging on the walls of the rooms depicted.
When the church and the aristocracy were the patrons of art, it is hardly surprising that artists chose to paint religious, mythological, and historical subjects. Knowing who their patrons were, artists aspired to produce big paintings with big themes—a crucifixion or a coronation. The Dutch genre painters operated on a different scale. What is so striking for a set of masterpieces is how small all the paintings in this exhibition are. They had to be if they were to be affordable to middle-class customers.
Thus in the 17th century in the Netherlands, painting took a giant step toward the increasingly true-to-life representation of reality. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, painters tended to take only religious and aristocratic subjects seriously. To the extent that everyday life crept into their paintings, it was only in the context of a religious narrative. If I had to pick the earliest example of genre painting in art history, I would offer Robert Campin’s Merode Triptych (ca. 1420-30). Under the guise of telling the story of the Virgin Mary, Campin creates in the triptych’s right wing a self-contained portrait of the kind of carpenter’s shop he might have passed every day in his hometown—right down to a very realistic set of carpenter’s tools. If detached, the right wing would be a perfect example of Dutch genre painting—a moment of ordinary contemporary life caught in exquisite detail.
Detail from the right wing of the Robert Campin's 'Merode Triptych' (ca. 1427-32) (CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons)
Campin could get away with painting a standalone carpenter’s shop, but not with just any old carpenter—it had to be the Virgin Mary’s husband, Joseph. The so-called Flemish Primitives, including Campin, van der Weyden, and the van Eyck brothers, loved portraying daily life in all its material reality; to do so they pioneered oil paint as a medium. Only at that stage of art history, painting everyday life needed justification in terms of something that was not everyday. Much as Erich Auerbach argues about literature in his magisterial book Mimesis, the representation of everyday reality in painting emerged in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance largely under the influence of Christianity and its sanctification of ordinary life. Only a religious theme could give sufficient gravitas to everyday reality to justify taking it seriously in painting.
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As crude as it may sound, middle-class money liberated Dutch painters to deal directly with everyday life in its own terms. As you walk through Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, think about how relentlessly secular the paintings are and how odd that is in light of the prior history of European painting (even one generation earlier, Rembrandt still devoted a great number of his paintings to religious themes). No crucifixions, no resurrections, no transfigurations, no Madonnas, no saints. (Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance comes closest to being religious, with a painting of the Last Judgment in the background that supplies a religious subtext to the painting: “You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.”) For these Dutch painters, ordinary life has become worthy of serious treatment in all its ordinariness. And, at least in Vermeer’s paintings, ordinary life begins to acquire its own spirituality—it has its own depth, even without reference to a religious background. That is the great achievement of Dutch genre painting and why it has such a powerful appeal even today.
Vermeer's 'Woman Holding a Balance' (ca. 1664) (CREDIT: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection)
Being an English professor, as I viewed the Vermeer exhibition in Dublin, the city of James Joyce and Ulysses, I could not help thinking how novelistic these paintings are. We often credit the English novelists of the 18th century—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne—with having discovered how to portray ordinary middle-class life in art, to give expression to the joys and pains of everyday existence, especially in the tangled webs of romance between men and women. But this Vermeer exhibition offers visual proof that all these subjects were being taken up decades earlier in Dutch genre painting. Each painting reads like a chapter in a novel—for example, the beginning or end of a courtship. As in 18th-century English novels, particularly Defoe’s, we see an art that reflected the new interest in material things that accompanied the rise of the middle class. We need to give the Dutch more credit—they pioneered not only the economic institutions of middle-class life, but also its representation in artistic form.
