Has Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring finally been unmasked?
Nowadays the word ‘iconic’ is vastly overused. But there is no doubt that one painting, Girl With A Pearl Earring by the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, has indeed become an icon. Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel inspired by the painting has sold more than five million copies worldwide and its popularity led to a successful film adaptation (starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth) in 2003.
Woman reading a letter: Johannes Vermeer
Why is that particular painting so loved? It is a visual symbol of the sublime. The beautiful young girl in yellow and blue turns to look directly at the viewer, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open – as if she has been surprised by something that fills her with wonder and awe. Now the distinguished art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has developed an astonishing theory of what the painting means. I won’t unveil it just yet, but it is one of the revelations that make his brilliant new biography of Vermeer so original and exciting.
The overwhelming impression of Vermeer’s art is stillness. A woman pours milk from a jug, or reads a letter, or plays an instrument, or makes lace, or looks up at her maid with a question we cannot fathom. There is a profound mystery as well as tenderness in these works. Often a curtain is pulled aside, as if for us to glimpse a tableau on a silent stage, illuminated softly from the left, before the moment of mindfulness is over and we are left wondering what just happened.
It is unsurprising that the strange, hypnotic mood of Vermeer’s work has mesmerised thousands. In 2023, over four months, about 650,000 people visited the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was the most successful show in the museum’s history. Yet I wonder how many visitors, shuffling past the View Of Delft, and the enchanting glimpse afforded by The Little Street, knew that the calm of Vermeer’s world had its roots in turmoil.
Andrew Graham-Dixon is that rare thing – a tireless scholar and critic who looks beyond the analysis and appreciation of art into its very soul. Over the pages of this ground-breaking book he evokes the rich, deep subsoil into which Vermeer was planted and flourished: the Golden Age of Dutch Art set against the terrible history of conflicts that spread suffering over 17th century Europe.
Scarlett Johansen and Colin Firth in the Girl With the Pearl Earring (2003)
The history of religious upheaval, persecution and war is complex, fascinating and appalling, and Graham-Dixon rightly calls it ‘the inheritance’. He believes the background is essential for an understanding of why Vermeer painted his pictures and what they mean. The zeitgeist is the defining spirit of a particular stage in history, and for Vermeer it was the cumulative effect of the unimaginable atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and Dutch rebels’ Eighty Years’ War against the brutality of the Spanish occupiers, which split the Netherlands but led to the creation of the Dutch Republic. To over-simplify – out of blood and bitterness came the vision of grace that permeates Vermeer’s work.
I read Graham-Dixon while referring constantly to Karl Schutz’s huge, magnificent Complete Works of Vermeer published by Taschen. To do so was enlightening, because this new book seems to be driven by what other works on the artist lack: real passion. There is no dry scholarship here. The thesis hinges on the idea that Vermeer’s life and work were rooted in the moderate wing of the Dutch Revolt – in what we would now call a non-conformist and pacifist ‘sect’, with tolerance and respect for women at its heart.
Why were so many of Vermeer’s paintings kept together in one private house? Graham-Dixon’s answer to that question is key to his understanding of the artist – and returns us to religion. Vermeer’s patrons Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and his wife Maria were Protestant ‘Remonstrants’ who rebelled against the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination (which means you have no choice) and preached the power of the individual conscience. The author believes that Vermeer (whose wife and her family were Catholic, adding another layer…) was entirely sympathetic to this cause.
What’s more, he sees the majority of Vermeer’s most familiar paintings as devotional works, often paired, expressing ideas about God and man, making ‘human and divine love vivid and visible’. In explaining what he means and analysing the paintings accordingly, Graham-Dixon packs his own soul into academic analysis – and the result is often transcendental. He wants us to understand ‘the spiritual energy emanating from the church’ (ie the Remonstrants) as key to the mystery of Vermeer’s art.
Critics might call out the many suppositions: the text is littered with ‘might have’, ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘very likely’ and other qualifiers. Sometimes it’s almost as if Graham-Dixon is creating his own fictions. His revelation that Girl With A Pearl Earring is really meant to offer a secret vision of Mary Magdalene at the moment she realises the identity of the risen Christ is a suggestion that didn’t work for me.
Yet how profound and uplifting it is when the author describes the View Of Delft as ‘a prophetic vision… the unbearably beautiful spectacle of what human life would be like if only we would make it so’. No more war – just peace and beauty as the storm clouds pass. His analysis of The Lacemaker in terms of a woman’s pregnancy took my breath away, and his description of The Art Of Painting transformed my physical encounter with the work last week in Vienna.
For many years, Vermeer’s work was ‘lost’, in that the artist somehow slipped off the register, partly because of the accumulation of his work in the one house, that of Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and his wife Maria. The complex story of this contributes to the fascination of Andrew Graham- Dixon’s personal quest to find the real Vermeer.
Of course Graham-Dixon will have his critics. But anyone who loves art will warm to the beguiling, personal nature of a beautifully written narrative, with its roots in the author’s understanding of ‘a religious and intellectual movement driven by the desire to reform society and make the world a fairer and better place’. This is art history as an imaginative leap into a world in which enlightenment was the only bulwark against chaos, and toleration was – as it still is – necessary for civilisation.