Word: vermeer
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...enduring appeal of Johannes Vermeer - a new exhibition of his paintings has just proved a runaway success at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and transfers to London's National Gallery this summer - is based on an enigma. The master of precision, mood and detail, Vermeer nevertheless avoided all that is discordant and jarring - what Anthony Bailey, in his engrossing new book 'A View of Delft' (Chatto & Windus; 224 pages), terms "the messiness of life...
...What takes Bailey's book beyond art history is his ability to see Vermeer in the context of life in mid-17th century Holland. To survive, an artist needed wealthy patrons - and the more the better. Vermeer had few benefactors, and he gained no more than a quarter of his income from painting; most came from his mother-in-law and his work as an art dealer. While contemporaries like Rembrandt and Frans Hals specialized in large canvases, lively down-to-earth realism and volume - 40 or 50 paintings a year - Vermeer's pictures are small, frozen-in-time images...
...innkeeper, Vermeer was the father of 15 children, a Roman Catholic-leaning Protestant and a home-towner who rarely left Delft. But this is about all we know; no character descriptions or other salient facts exist. In his short life - born in 1632, died in 1675 of unknown causes although his wife, Catharina, blamed "decay and decadence" - he was never particularly successful. It was not until 1866, when a radical French critic named Théophile Thoré wrote three articles about him, that the art world beyond Holland took much notice...
Neither can Vermeer's sharp-eyed mother-in-law and his perpetually pregnant wife, particularly after she learns that her earring is the same as the one worn by Greit in her portrait. But the truth is loftier than a studio tryst between artist and model. In fact, Chevalier's version is sexier: an exquisitely controlled exercise that illustrates how temptation is restrained for the sake...
...bonus, the novel is wrapped in the most attractive book jacket in recent memory: a reproduction of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, her eyes signaling both anxiety and expectation. Now if Chevalier could be persuaded to take on Leonardo da Vinci, she might have him ask the smirking Mona Lisa, "What's so damn amusing...