Published: 04/07/2023
Gaze at a painting by Vermeer, and time stands still. You are there, in the moment; you may find yourself on the far riverbank looking over at Delft early one morning; or looking in on a young woman reading a letter by a sunny window. This was brought home to me very powerfully by the art historians who spoke so perceptively in the film of the recent Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam.
Click here for details of Vermeer film
Click here for Stephen Fry’s engaging ‘tour’ of the paintings in the Rijksmuseum exhibition
The film was made by the company ‘Exhibition on Screen’ (EOS). EOS specialise in giving those of us unable to travel to the galleries hosting these wonderful exhibitions an opportunity to experience them from afar, was it were, in a cinema closer to home. Heretical as it may sound, watching one of these films can seem in some ways a richer experience than a gallery visit. They provide a way to engage with the art works more closely, in fact, than would have been possible in a crowded, noisy gallery. In the Vermeer film, we are shown the paintings directly, with some gentle zooming in on detail, and given time simply to look; then curators and conservators from the Rijksmuseum point out aspects of their composition, subject matter or technique, speaking from the gallery. They are very knowledgeable and lucid, drawing out the qualities of Vermeer’s work, his development and his very distinctive approach to using light. The absence of visible brushstrokes in the paintings is something else to marvel at, whether Vermeer creates the richness of the ermine edging on a yellow jacket, the vibrant red of a jaunty lady’s hat, or the robust crumbly texture of a loaf of rustic bread.
To us, the women in Vermeer’s interiors might seem to have led sheltered and sometimes rather trapped lives, whether they were milkmaids, ladies’ maids, or the wives and daughters of the wealthy burghers of the Netherlands in the 17th century. It was suggested in the film, though, that Vermeer painted these women in such a way that their rich inner lives were revealed. This I found very persuasive; do you, I wonder? Consider the girl with a pearl earring in the painting of that name. Was Tracy Chevalier inspired to write her novel (later a film) partly thanks for Vermeer’s ability to paint this girl so poignantly? Looking back on her encounters with that painting in 2019, Chevalier writes of how it dawned on her that the girl’s gaze was not at us, the viewer, but at Vermeer, the artist. ‘Suddenly the painting became not about a specific girl, or even an idealised girl, but about a relationship. And what was that relationship? We don’t know……’. She adds ‘When I was first working on it, I thought: You’re writing about Vermeer, so write it the way he paints – spare, focussed, stripped down to the essentials’.
Griet, Chevalier’s ‘girl’, has a particular affinity for colour. So does the art historian James Fox, who describes this affinity as ‘chromophilia’, and claims that ‘without such chromophilia, I would never have found such beauty in banality’*. We learn from the film that Vermeer didn’t concentrate so much on colour as on light; that is how he made his colours shine out.
Producer Phil Grabsky and director David Bickerstaff have really come into their own with this film, I would suggest. The camera takes into the rooms in the Rijksmuseum without anyone else there, and we are allowed to linger and look. Now and then an expert speaks, sitting calmly in front of one or more of the works. The paintings are hung against a sombre background, with ample space around each one, so that nothing detracts from their expressive beauty. Previous EOS films have been valuable as documentaries and have given us glimpses of exhibitions we may have missed, such as the film of the Cezanne exhibition a few years ago. In that film, Cezanne’s life was explored, as well as his paintings. With Vermeer, however, the fact that so little is known about Vermeer’s life meant that the focus of this present film was more intensely shone upon the 28 paintings in the exhibition (of the 35 known to still exist), and this enhanced the intensity of the experience.
In short, this is undoubtedly a film to see. As a film, it has an unpretentious ‘transparency’: there is no cinematic veneer obtruding between the cinema goer and the paintings. Vermeer’s artistry – perhaps more than that of any other painter before or since - enables us to find ‘beauty in banality.’
*James Fox, The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, Penguin 2021 - Click here for book review on the 'Books' page
