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According to one account, Johannes Vermeer, the great 17th-century Dutch painter, was a genius so potent that a close encounter with his work could kill you.
In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the writer Bergotte hears that his favourite painting, Vermeer’s “View of Delft”, is on display in Paris. “Bergotte ate a few potatoes”, Proust’s narrator tells us, “and went out to the exhibition.” Though he thinks he knows every inch of the canvas, he is drawn with horrified fascination to a tiny and previously unnoticed area: “That is how I should have written . . . made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall.” Overcome by dizziness, Bergotte collapses on to a sofa in the gallery, and dies.
The blockbuster 2023 exhibition of Vermeer’s paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam attracted 650,000 visitors — a record for the museum. This suggests that the passion for Vermeer’s work that Proust both felt and described continues to burn unabated.
In some ways this intensity of enthusiasm is surprising, since Vermeer is the least spectacular of great painters, best known for quiet interior scenes of softly illuminated figures engaged in activities such as pouring milk or sewing. Where his compatriots, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, stare out at us from endless self-portraits, Vermeer seems to have fled the scene of his paintings.
But these characteristics, which led to Vermeer being largely overlooked in the centuries following his death in 1675, are precisely those for which he is now revered: a fervent vagueness in his paintings suggests that someone has been there, something remarkable has been effected, and we are left to work out exactly what.
Now in a new biography, Andrew Graham-Dixon, however, seeks to return Vermeer to the scene of his art, arguing that a coherent religion and worldview — tolerant, open-minded, fervent but non-dogmatic — can be derived from his canvases.
Vermeer’s absence from his works is reflected in his near invisibility in the historical archive. This makes him both an irresistible subject for biography and an extremely challenging one. Graham-Dixon responds by creating a rich sense of the worlds that Vermeer inhabited: the chaotic upheavals of the wider Dutch Republic, a tiny nation forged through 80 years of war with the might of Spain that ended only in 1648, and the impact of these wider struggles on the local milieux of Delft, where Vermeer lived and died.
Graham-Dixon, an established biographer and art critic, focuses in particular on the remarkable and seemingly unique relationship that Vermeer had with his patrons, Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt. He painted exclusively for them over a 12-year period, and the majority of his small body of works hung in their house in Delft. What a place to visit — Bergotte’s mind would have been blown.
The picture of the Dutch world that Graham-Dixon creates, with its industriousness and prosperity punctuated and haunted by the hinterland of religious strife and warfare, is compelling and informative, and the depiction of these patronage relations intriguing and largely convincing, but the test of an artist’s biography is always going to be how it treats the paintings, and here Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is much less successful.
With a life meagrely documented even by 17th-century standards, largely because his art was admired only in small and private circles, the biographer has no choice but to speculate, infer, and suggest. But the purpose of such speculation should surely be to expand and multiply the possible meanings of the artist’s works. Time and again, Graham-Dixon does the opposite, and presents his interpretation as having solved the mystery of a Vermeer painting once and for all.
Here is the most egregious of many examples. Describing one of Vermeer’s most astonishing paintings, “The Lacemaker”, Graham-Dixon rightly focuses on the sewing cushion in the left foreground, from which unfurl skeins of red and white paint that wouldn’t be out of place on a Jackson Pollock canvas. But for Graham-Dixon this has a clear meaning — the woman is pregnant — and it is a meaning that he describes in decidedly weird terms: “while the girl is working away at her little piece of lace, with her full attention and her busy hands, another far finer piece of lace is taking shape within her body.” Really?
There is no doubt that the veins of paint suggest the visceral tangles of the human body, but to read them in this straightforward and single-minded way is to rush past and extinguish the glowing combination of opacity and specificity that draws us to Vermeer’s canvases in the first place. Time and again, molten possibility hardens into the brittle pumice of a supposedly single significance. This book is well-grounded in scholarship and, apart from these passages of purple prose claiming to enter the minds and bodies of Vermeer’s figures, the writing is lively and adroit, but it lacks the most elusive and characteristic feature of Vermeer the artist: tact.
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon Allen Lane £30, 416 pages
Joe Moshenska is a professor of English literature at Oxford university and author of ‘Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton’
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