I had given up all hope of a ticket for Vermeer, until an attentive, art-loving one NRCreader managed to get my wife and me in after all, even without having to smash a window of the Rijksmuseum.
There we were, in the middle of the day, surrounded by sheer beauty after a trip through a city overflowing with uncollected garbage. The light of Vermeer against the dirt of the city – an unequal battle.
It was busy in the halls, but not too much. I remember exhibitions where visitors stood in thick rows pushing for the paintings. That was not the case here, with a little patience everyone could get a good place. Only the amateur photographers caused any nuisance with their mobile phones. There is something incomprehensible about it: they hardly look at the painting, if at all, they only photograph it – to look at it at home, or maybe not at all.
If only John Updike, the American writer (1932–2009), could experience this exhibition. I mention him because of all literary writers he has been the greatest connoisseur and admirer of Vermeer. In one of his essays on painting, he describes with great disgust the crowds at a Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington in 1995 (23 paintings) and a 2005 exhibition of drawings by Vincent van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. York. He sees ‘docile masses’ who almost stick their noses into the exhibited work.
Updike became interested in Vermeer as a schoolboy. He wrote a nice, autobiographical story about it: ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town’. In it, a boy, together with his father, visits an older brother of that father in New York. The boy’s father is a passive man, the older brother is a successful businessman. It is the boy’s first visit to New York, where he wants to buy a “good book” about Vermeer.
The wealthy uncle listens to him skeptically and starts bragging about four paintings by Degas that he has hanging in his living room in Chicago. “Yes,” says the boy, “but don’t Degas’ paintings remind you of colored drawings? When it comes to it to look to things in terms of paint, with a sharp eye, Degas can’t match Vermeer.”
The uncle says nothing and the father apologizes: “That’s how he and his mother always talk. I can not reach it. I never understand any of it.”
As a boy, Updike dreamed that he would later “paint paintings as heavenly and tranquil as those of Vermeer.” Much later he would Just looking write the highly admiring essay ‘An Outdoor Vermeer’; it’s mostly about View of Delftwhich he viewed in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Walking through the exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, I wondered what Updike had thought of some of Vermeer’s other paintings. For example from The soldier and the laughing girl, which I have a weakness for myself. Do they know each other, or are they seeing each other for the first time? She smiles captivatingly, we only see him from the back. Did he tell a nice joke or maybe even propose? Everything is possible. In short, a painting that seems made for Updike and his ‘lucid eye’.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 24, 2023
