Johannes Vermeer is such a quiet and introspective artist that it took hundreds of years for anyone to notice he was a genius. Today he is so revered that it is hard to grasp how unknown he once was.
A major Vermeer exhibition opens this month at the Louvre in Paris, whose permanent collection includes his great painting of a woman absorbed in close, visually demanding work, The Lacemaker (about 1669-70). Her eyes are concentrated downward on the tiny stuff her steady hands are making, while our eyes in turn take in precise and glistening details: bright red threads against blue cloth, silvery beads, the grain of a table covering, her finely curled ringlets.
Like other paintings by Vermeer, this image haunts modern culture. It gave its title to a classic French film starring Isabelle Huppert. That modern cultural fascination with this 17th-century artist runs from Tracy Chevalier to Marcel Proust, who put Vermeer’s View of Delft into The Remembrance of Things Past.
So entranced are today’s art lovers by Vermeer that it was thought shocking when a recent survey found that 82% of Americans can’t name who painted The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Well, maybe they don’t go to the movies much. Before 1850, a similar survey would have probably found that less than 1% could name Vermeer.
It is not true to say he was forgotten – that would imply he was famous in his lifetime. He was not. Vermeer was one more painter among the many who worked for money in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. He was not a star like Rembrandt. He obviously took himself and his art seriously – his self-referential work The Art of Painting proves that – but he worked all his life in Delft, painted only 35 known works and left his family destitute when he died in 1675.
The elusiveness and subtlety of his art was at odds with the flamboyant Baroque age in which he lived, and with the ideals of art that prevailed in the subsequent Romantic period. Vermeer seemed just another “genre painter”, a humble artist of everyday life – the context to which the Louvre exhibition will return him. So how did he become so famous in modern times that by the 1930s Hans van Meegeren faked his works in one of the biggest forgery scandals of all time?
It is fitting that Paris is celebrating Vermeer, because it was the French avant-garde in the 19th century who saved him from oblivion. Compare his paintings Woman in Blue Reading a Letter or The Little Street with, say, Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) or Camille Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897) and it is easy to see why the art of Vermeer found its natural audience in Parisian bohemia. Early modernist painting in France looked sensitively at ordinary people in ordinary places. Vermeer’s woman reading a letter, whose contents we can only guess at, shares the introspection of the absinthe drinker observed in her depths of melancholy by Degas.
All these artists are likely to have known about and admired Vermeer due to the efforts of the radical critic Thoré-Bürger, a veteran of the 1848 revolution who championed this Dutch master as well as contemporaries like Delacroix and Ingres.
Vermeer’s rediscovery is part of the history of modern French art. Just as Dutch artists in the 17th century had cherished everyday life and things, so artists in the age of Manet turned their eyes to the real and unpretentious. Manet and Henri Fantin Latour even painted flowers that share the sensitivity of Dutch flower paintings 200 years earlier. Vermeer is not only a great artist. He is a great modern artist.