In the Rijksmuseum, the evidence of centuries of Dutch power hung on the walls (it was suddenly easy to imagine Peter Stuyvesant, 'Old Silvernails', ruling Manhattan). Rembrandt's Night Watch is the most hallowed painting there -- boldly rendered at mural size to scream "masterpiece!", and always crowded with spectators -- but it's no surprise that, in such a small country, the true wonders in the national museum are the tiny Vermeers clustered together a few galleries away. Vermeer is famous to us now -- he just got a fresh dusting from the new movie Girl With A Pearl Earring, which is based on a book inspired by his painting -- but he fell into obscurity after his death in 1675 and stayed there until the mid-1800s. His laggard posthumous celebrity must owe some debt not only to the extreme miniaturism of his works but to their scant number: probably not more than fifty Vermeers survive; only thirty-six are acknowledged.
The little we know about Johannes Vermeer doesn't suggest a genius. He lived and worked in Delft, a small market town, where apparently he was an art dealer himself. He married into an affluent Catholic family (he converted) who supported his painting, and fathered eleven children. If he sold much of his work, it was to private local patrons. Word of Vermeer's talent doesn't seem to have spread far beyond Delft. We don't know whether today's scarcity of Vermeers owes to limited output, or to disappearance or destruction. It's hard, though, to imagine anyone in the mid-1600s cranking out hundreds of those fastidious paintings: they're as intricate and fine as the innards of a wristwatch. When Vermeer's fortunes fell -- either because he had no more success selling his work, because he had none left to sell, or because his dealership failed -- his health soon followed. Reportedly distraught over failing to provide for his family, he died from a stress-related heart attack or stroke, ten years after Peter Stuyvesant handed New Amsterdam over to the English Duke of York.
The mundane surface of Vermeer's life matches that of his paintings: women reading letters, pouring milk; a (self?) portrait of an artist, with his back to the viewer, at work in his studio; a village square. But look past his banal subjects, and a mystery develops: numerological exactness, secretive claustrophobia, ineffable religiosity and sexual suggestiveness. Although Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer's contemporary, endures as a fellow master of Dutch realism (his pieces are sunnier, less mathematical, and simpler than his rival's), the Vermeers somehow suggest that the artist channeled apparitions of an alternate age that never came to be, perhaps because he deceived his oracle by rendering its dim visions. He probably knew Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Delft scientist who is known as the 'Father of the Microscope'; it follows that Leeuwenhoek may have introduced Vermeer to all kinds of sophisticated lenses and ocular devices -- Vermeer almost certainly employed the camera obscura in his drafting -- that would have contributed to a proto-photographic style. But his mechanical innovations don't explain the hauntingly still, weirdly voyeuristic quality of the finished paintings. The clearer and sharper their detail, the more inscrutable their purpose and meaning become. Each of Vermeer's fleeting scenes portends some extraordinary, even shattering occurrence, but one we'll never witness -- we blink and refocus our gaze, but the godhead, the prophecy, or the earthquake we might descry in the canvas will have vanished. Looking at Vermeer is like chasing electrons. Because his biography remains sketchy, and because his paintings deploy all that exacting precision for the apparent cross-purpose of bemusing the viewer, rosicrucian conspiracy theories have popped up about Vermeer. I like one that says he was a member of a secret society like the 'Priory of Sion' that taught him 'Grail Geometry' and then had him killed, at age 43, for some unnamed apostasy.
