First Among Equals
- Guy Priel
- Jan 26
- 8 min read
Those who have known me for a while or simply know me only through my weekly blog posts, know that I am an avid fan of art and books. I have always been fascinated by the works of European authors. One author I recently rediscovered was French author Marcel Proust. And, of course, I love Dutch artists.
On a May morning in 1921 Marcel Proust ventured from his bed, where he spent most of his time, to see an exhibition of Dutch painters at the Jeu de Paume. Organized to demonstrate the modern sensibilities of certain old masters, it had been lavishly praised, including by a friend, who reviewed it under the title “The Mysterious Vermeer.” Vermeer had been an obsession for Proust since he saw "The View of Delft" at The Hague in 1902 and called it “the most beautiful painting in the world.” In Swann’s Way, Vermeer figured prominently as the epitome of aesthetic perfection and an impediment to human relations.
Proust had hoped to write a study of Vermeer himself. Through Swann he expressed the fear that his own masterpiece would remain unfinished. So famous were Proust’s reflections on Vermeer that the 1921 exhibition included "The View of Delft" just so the ailing novelist could behold his favorite painting one last time.
A photograph survives of Proust’s excursion. The last taken of the writer before he died, it shows him standing erect and elegant outside the Jeu de Paume. Before leaving his bed he confided that he did not want to ruin the exhibition by dying in the galleries. These worries found fictional expression. The character Bergotte - a writer and another of Proust’s alter egos - dies in front of a Vermeer. Lured from his sickbed by the words of a critic, Bergotte seeks in the canvas a detail he had missed or forgotten: an exquisitely painted patch of wall. He wanders galleries hung with paintings that all seem “artificial” and arrives at the Vermeer, a work “more different from anything else that he knew.” His head spinning, he finds the yellow patch - and finds his life wanting.
It is Vermeer’s most dramatic reception. But the epiphany of the painter’s difference from others in the tradition, and the intuition that this uniqueness is mysteriously founded in paint per se, have been common themes in the Vermeer literature since his modern rediscovery. In 1866 one art critic claimed to have rescued the artist from oblivion. He called Vermeer “the Sphinx of Delft” due to the silence of past historians and the enigmatic quality of his art. The 1866 Paris Salon included a loan show containing eleven paintings attributed to “Jan van de Meer.” Critics swooned. Representative of everyone “disinherited” by history, Vermeer, evokes no parallels or comparisons.
Compared to other Dutch masters whose biographies were established; Vermeer was unknown. Deemed the result of his having been ignored in his day, this oblivion became proof of his modernity. We go to him because a sort of mysterious prescience made him see as we see, made him discern, divine, and anticipate a sensibility that would not develop until two centuries after him. This sensibility was one that allowed things to appear as they are, sometimes to the point of obscurity - in anticipation of Impressionism or of photography.
It is impossible to mistake a Vermeer for the work of another master, but the path to his recovery was riddled with error. One biographer attributed 74 paintings to him, more than twice the number currently accepted. And he singled out for special acclaim works that turned out to be by an amateur, Dirk Jan van der Laan, active in Zwolle around 1800. A later generation corrected these errors, but the rage for Vermeers and their scarcity drove prices up, encouraging frauds and forgeries. By the 1970s, the number of authentic Vermeers had dropped to 31 - the accepted collection currently stands between t34 and 37 works.
Meanwhile, historians unearthed a wealth of information about the painter’s domestic life, patrons, religion, and finances, and they debunked the myth of Vermeer as an unrecognized genius. He turns out to have been collected, admired, and imitated in his day. His eclipse was due to his limited output and narrow circle of patrons, and to accident: the chief early authority on Dutch art listed other famous painters from Delft but accidentally missed out on Vermeer, who was named in a description of the City of Delft as the new artistic phoenix.
And yet the idea of Vermeer’s obscurity remains. Something about Vermeer continues to make him sphinxlike no matter how much we know. This is because the artist turned his back on us. Vermeer faces away in order to turn us toward his work, all his work.
The idea spoke to Proust, who insisted that an author’s true self is revealed only in his books, and whose novel dramatizes the gap between individuals. Artworks show their maker by manifesting the unique way the world appears to that one person. Without art this difference would remain the secret of every individual. Vermeer’s secret is that he unlocks everyone’s secret - in the all-encompassing but inexpressibly individual how of our perception of the world. “Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal,” wrote Proust, “whether their name be Rembrandt or Vermeer.”
For Proust and his contemporaries, Vermeer was fundamentally different, the artist who set his painted world most apart from all other worlds, including the art world of the Dutch Republic in its heyday. Proust complained that the Louvre hung Vermeer’s "Lacemaker" with other Dutch masters: the work should be exhibited “as a masterpiece, apart.” Many would still agree. Museums tend to display Vermeer among Dutch works of his period, but most visitors pass these by to get to the canvas they know and love, expecting from it alone a life-changing experience.
Vermeer thus joined a lively competition among rivals, each turning his prototype to his advantage. In "Girl with a Pear Earring," for example, he is blocking our access to the woman through a dark barrier of table and chair. He left out the attendant maid, bathed the scene in wondrous light that the woman’s satin jacket turns to gold, and gave her a look of momentary but sublime self-awareness. He made it seem like it is the woman herself who stands apart, from him and us as amazed voyeurs. But viewed as artistic rivalry, this apartness becomes an effect engineered by Vermeer to set himself apart.
There are over a thousand distinct connections between the genre paintings of the leaders in the field in the years 1650–1675. It is a powerful demonstration - Vermeer first among equals, responding more to artworks than to the world - and the stakes are high. Dutch painting exemplified the idea that art reflects the time when it was made. All art was believed to do this - a Gothic cathedral reflected the worldview of the Middle Ages; Michelangelo embodied the Renaissance. This made art a window onto the past.
But in the Dutch case, the match between the paintings and their period was more extreme. For the first time artists depicted not some story from an ancient past but contemporary life around them. Such realism reflected specific historical conditions - hard-won freedom from foreign rule, the Protestant ethic, the hegemony of an urban middle class - and it did so with a unique directness. The Dutch already pictured their world - vividly - as 19th Century historicism would assert all human worlds to be - not a divine order or a satanic disorder but the construct of a specific, time-bound social collective. At the core of their achievement stood the merry companies, paintings of people eating, drinking, and music-making.
Over the next 200 years art severed itself from communal life. It became modern less by reflecting modern circumstances than by miming earlier styles and turning inward. Vermeer’s rediscovery went hand in hand with a sense not only of his difference from his contemporaries, but also of his kinship with modern painters who try to capture life in the fugitive present moment. Placing him back among the masters of genre painting runs counter to this stubborn view. Such a view cannot be undone by historical argument alone. No one doubts that Vermeer was of his time. The question is whether his modernity, which has dazzled viewers for more than a century, can and should be denied.
Genre painting is too wide a term for what these painters mastered. Pictures of everyday life had been a Netherlandish specialty since the 16th century, though this new art form had not acquired a name. Coined in the 18th century, genre denoted the representation of types, of nameless people doing everyday things, as opposed to the identifiable individuals in portraits and history paintings. Almost all the early genre paintings looked down on their subjects.
Around 1650 a genre of genre painting arose that looked not down but across at its subjects. The portrait format of these canvases - earlier genre scenes were oriented horizontally - reflected this elevation, as did its focus on relatively few figures, compared to the crowded merry companies of old. Most important was the social milieu of these high-life genre paintings. Elegant ladies and gentlemen in lavishly appointed homes engage in the pastimes of a leisured class.
Two words from the period described these paintings. They were bourgeois, as opposed to common or noble. And they were modern: the paintings depicted contemporary life. This modern, bourgeois art had a brief run. It began around 1650, after the Peace of Westphalia secured Dutch independence, and it waned after 1672, when the republic was attacked by five great powers, never quite to recover economically. During this period hundreds of painters’ shops produced many hundreds of thousands of paintings for the widest public that painting ever enjoyed. But within this market the masters of genre painting formed an elite, their membership marked and sealed by their imitation of and rivalry with fellow members.
Authors allow readers to play this game on their own. Works are discussed and illustrated in clusters, each featuring a shared motif or device, such as letter-writing, musical duets, mirrors, or pets. Certain chains of influence remain speculative, but the authors do not force them on the reader, and the general fact of influence is as fascinating as it is indisputable. It is common wisdom that people become poets by reading poetry and that artists work with schemata that represent reality by force of convention. All of European literature developed from an ancient seedbed of clichéd phrases. Dutch high-life genre paintings derive from stock motifs as well, such as kitchen scenes and allegories of the four elements, the virtues and vices, and the five senses.
But there are new and unprecedented departures, too.
Vermeer left us no pendant canvases of corresponding lovers - only his "Astronomer" and "Geographer" (both of which I have in print form) of 1668 and 1669 were made to hang side by side. He opted to condense epistolary exchange into a single tableau, with an attendant maid evoking the world traversed.
Proust says of his beloved Vermeers, “they are fragments of an identical world.” Again, this is because they all belong to the artist’s specific vision. In Vermeer all the moments of the picture, like 100 needles on 100 compass dials, indicate precisely the same immutable deviation. The question is, Have the dissimilar similarities brought to light by Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting moved the compass needle?
We see more clearly that Vermeer set himself apart and we see how. Most obviously, he does so by setting his subjects apart from us. The other masters appeal to us theatrically by comparison. Stories do unfold in Vermeer’s canvases. A woman listens as she tunes her lute, another pauses to think while writing a letter. But they do not seem to do so for us. The chairs, curtains, and tabletops that press toward us from Vermeer’s foregrounds contribute to this sense of turning inward and away.
But there is more to Vermeer’s detachment than mere motifs. Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. Many writers have drawn attention to Vermeer’s habit of blurring objects he represents. Where others seek to delineate, he allows painted forms to dissolve into the surface of the pigments they physically are - Bergotte’s fatal “yellow patch of wall.”

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