Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Johannes Vermeer
Dutch; 17th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
93%
The Art of Painting. c1666. Oil on canvas
The map on the back wall is occluded by the chandelier, easel, and girl in blue; the girl is occluded by the table; the table is occluded by all the stuff that's covering it, which is occluded in turn by the chair in the foreground; the painting within this painting, on the easel at right, is occluded by the painter with his brush. It's fair to say that this is a picture about the difficulty of seeing anything, not least of all pictures — to the point where its cascade of occlusions is set off by that curtain taking up the whole left quarter of the image, which is as much an actual as it is an illusory obstruction of our view of the scene: it hides the cause of everything's visibility (the light streaming in from a presumed window at left) at the same time as it reveals itself to us as painted matter right on the actual painting's actual surface. And yet, despite all that this painting withholds — not least of all its light source — it reveals so much more. There's an eerie immanence to the way illumination works, as if it's coming from inside of the stuff we see. There's an equipoise, too, to all the objects. The march of the table in towards the girl is offset by the angle of the book she's holding; the painter's maulstick shoots one way, his subject's instrument the other; the chair in the foreground catches the tilt of the artist's stool; the fabrics on the table are a doubling of the way the curtain folds in front of them. But these aren't empty relations: they're a response to pessimism about vision which other elements of this painting express. "Seeing," they seem to say, "is seeing what's amongst, not what is." (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Frick Collection
90%
Officer with a Laughing Girl. c1657. Oil on canvas
This looks to me like an uncharacteristic Vermeer. It's much more about the massive presence of that near-silhouetted figure at the front of the image than it is about the way he (or anything else in the picture) relates to the other objects inside this volume of illusion. (That said, the distance between the officer and the girl is nothing if not pregnant — there are significant spatial relations at play here, they're just not the painting's main course.) One result of this is that, whereas most other Vermeers are allegories about what it is to look (at a painting and in general), this one instead seems to be about what it is to paint: there's veritable pointillism in the girl's face and clothes and in the chair she's sitting on; a block of orange seen through the window is pure colorplay; the tabletop could be a drip painting, especially the slice of it that's seen through the bend in the soldier's arm. There's always excess in Vermeer's highlights and shading, but here it's working on another level. And what facilitates it is the unflagging thereness of the man in hat right there against the picture plane, by whom any indulgence in paint for its own sake is hurled safely back into the milieu of representation. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
89%
A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. c1670. Oil on canvas
This painting is better than the similar, contemporaneous Vermeer it's hung next to at the National Gallery (Young Woman Standing). Why? For one, its light source is external to the scene, which forces the illuminated objects within it to do more work, both in themselves and as a relational unit, towards dramatizing the act of seeing (which is always what Vermeer's paintings boil down to). This is why there's more stuff in this scene compared to its unbusy neighbor. For two, there's less emptiness in this painting. While what emptiness there is (the slot between the gold frame and the curtain; the upturned "J" of space behind the musician) isn't necessarily less active than the voids in the other painting, it is less freighted with the task of conveying the entire picture. For three, and finally, the object-network here is more resolved, yet also more inviting of ambiguous relation, than that of the other painting. Look at the diamond-shaped cello-virginal-girl system, and how it's echoed by the window behind it to the left, corrected by the canvas behind it to the right, and rebuffed by the curtain moving in from the front. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Frick Collection
86%
Girl Interrupted at Her Music. 1660-1661. Oil on canvas
The best single feature of this painting is that wooden rack hanging in from and just below the top left corner of the canvas. In front of it, at center and taking up most the picture’s volume, there is a knot of caresses and cast-about physical presence that is quite a bit tighter than similar knots in other Vermeers: the paper the girl is holding implicates that tableau of stuff there on the table, and then this tableau launches the picture’s energy back up towards the male suitor who, in turn, wraps it all around the girl and the paper she’s holding (and so on). Things are hermetic here: all the activity in the picture is contained in — scrunched into — the receding prism that starts with the back of the empty chair and ends at the man’s shoulders. All the activity, that is, except for that rack there in the background, which in being so sole and self-contained seems to resolve from afar the cramped, circular tension at the picture’s core. If this is a device, it’s at least a device that’s been immaculately deployed. Otherwise, this piece lacks some of the unassuming painterliness of Vermeer’s best work — there’s not as much verve as there could be in its fabrics or the way the light hits the objects at rest — which brings it down a notch or two. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
86%
A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. c1670. Oil on canvas
What distinguishes Vermeer from similar Dutch painters (de Hooch; Metsu) is the relative amount of unreality which his paintings are able to abide: there's more of his hand in them, less decorum to the play of his light. But comparison with a coarser artist like Vrel shows that what makes Vermeer so special is that, intermingled with all that's unreal in his pictures, there is a substantial amount of what's real, too. Here, reality settles onto the surface of every object, from the marbled base of the virginal to the glinting gold frame on the wall to the individual pleats and wrinkles in the young woman's garb. Each of these is self-contained and self-complete: they are almost pictures, like those pictures hung behind them. Like pictures, these are real things holding the appearances of real things — they're at once actual, and not. Among Vermeer's paintings, this one is uniquely sparse, uniquely focused on objects in themselves rather than the relations between them: look at that swath of wall behind the girl, how it pushes all of the stuff that surrounds it (the chair!) back into, back onto itself. Since Vermeer is typically so much about his webs of connectivity, this painting, for the isolation of all its elements, stands slightly below some of his others in terms of quality. But it also shows what lies behind his method, what problems it set out to solve. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Frick Collection
84%
Mistress and Maid. 1667-1668. Oil on canvas
(Obviously there's no real genetic connection between the two paintings, but I have to mention the similarities between this composition and, flipped, that of Manet's Olympia: the maid's lean, the mistress's obscuring hand, the rumpled fabric covering a dominant horizontal. Anyways...) This picture ricochets less than the best Vermeers, wherein seeing any one thing is always an exercise in viewing a whole world of relations. Here, however, the bottom left half is rather bunched, and the top right half is spare: this is a painting of presence, rather than a painting of connectivity. One of the Frick's other Vermeers, Officer with a Laughing Girl, likewise offers up more of a solid image than it does a tissue of glances and affinity. That painting is better than this one, though, because the scene has been winnowed for the sake of presenting its image as a bold, singular force, almost an icon; here, all the stuff on the table detracts from the lithic presence of the mistress and the maid's slumping, but complex and indescribable, physical response to it. In a word, the picture is caught between being a cipher and a hieroglyph. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: Kenwood House
81%
The Guitar Player. c1672. Oil on canvas
Compared to the best Vermeers, this painting lacks a perfect moment of revelation: a punctum where the whole thing settles into itself and from where the image announces what it's up to as an image. There are plenty of contenders (various tiles of pure color in the girl's coat and dress; the red pages, sliced by white, of that book at right; the clean tan face of the guitar calling out to the front of the canvas; that pearl necklace) but none of them are quite as resolved as they might be. What all of these features in their small ways afford is some recognition of the fiction that's taking place — the fiction of painting. But, again, none of them go far enough. This isn't the fault of any one of these elements on their own, but rather of the painting overall, of how its arrangement activates (or, rather, fails to) all those potential little revelators. Look: the zigzag that starts at the girls right thigh, moves to her left knee, passes through the length of the guitar, and proceeds back up her arm and shoulder to eventually settle on her forehead, dominates the picture so completely as to leave most of its minor constituents (that red-rimmed book in the background, for instance) in the compositional lurch. Too, the painting-within-the-painting behind the musician's head (just where the zigzag crests) extends the illusion of pictorial depth, which further diminishes the effect of those several self-conscious structures. (Sure, the metapainting is self-conscious, too, but it's conceptually, rather than structurally so, and Vermeer's about the subtlety with which structure expresses concepts.) All that said, it's Vermeer we're talking about, so by no means do these missteps kill the painting. The play of light is still spectacular, and there's so much poise. But this is an artwork with limitations. (TFS, 2025)