Vermeer -- Unmissable, If You Can Get a Ticket

Of course you'll want to see Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: It's absolutely stunning. But if you haven't been fortunate enough to secure a ticket yet, you may very well be disappointed. Even though it's on till early June and open late three evenings a week, it's absolutely sold out, though the museum is planning to make another announcement on Monday March 6 (set an alert on your phone) on how they'll make more tickets available. 

This is truly an exceptional exhibition. Of the 37 paintings now attributed to Johannes Vermeer, the Rijksmuseum has assembled 28 (though there still seems to be an argument about whether a couple of them are truly by him). And although we've seen almost all of these pictures before, many of them on numerous occasions, it's a huge thrill to view them all together in one place. And we thought we'd done well to catch 23 Vermeers together at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1996. 

So this truly is one of those blockbuster shows. It's crowded inside, naturally, but this being the Netherlands, the art-going public is happy to wait its turn to get near enough to each of the widely spaced paintings. And, thanks to superb organisation and efficient staff we were in the exhibition space astonishingly quickly; there wasn't even a queue to get in when we arrived and there were plenty of lockers available to stash coats and bags. Quite a contrast from the long lines and horrendous crush at the Leonardo show at the Louvre a few years ago.  

What makes Vermeer so special? The relatively few paintings, of course, just those 37 from a two-decade career, spent entirely in the small city of Delft, that ended with his sudden death at the age of just 43. But above all, it's the stillness, the jewel-like nature, the enigmatic content and the remarkable depiction of light and materials in the finest of his paintings, some of which -- most notably the Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid -- have achieved truly iconic status as personifications of the Dutch Golden Age, when the Netherlands was the most prosperous country in the world.

You're not bombarded with a lot of extraneous information in this show. A few wall panels give a brief overview and some short explanations of how Vermeer constructed his masterpieces, but the paintings speak very much for themselves. The first room takes us into his home town, which then had just over 20,000 inhabitants, to see the View of Delft and The Little Street, Vermeer's only known townscapes.

It's the View of Delft that captures your attention first; bright sunshine on the red house roofs and the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in the centre of the painting, even as the left-hand side remains in shade under a fluffy cloud. The city gates are reflected in the scarcely moving waters of the canal, while on the bank nearest us, a couple of women converse. A scene of utter tranquillity; and yet only a few years earlier, much of the city had been devastated by a huge gunpowder explosion. There's a bit more activity in The Little Street; a woman in a doorway sews, children play. Vermeer captures the textures of the cobbles, wood and brickwork in a picture based on his aunt's house.  

Then it's on to Vermeer's early work: a couple of religious scenes (Vermeer married a Catholic, and may have converted to Catholicism himself), one from classical mythology -- large-scale, broad-brush, not the Vermeer that would go down in art history -- and then the first recognisable genre scene, The Procuress. What grabs the eye in The Procuress is the huge intricately patterned carpet or table-covering that takes up much of the foreground of the painting, and which we see the like of again, say in the Lady Writing with Her Maid. And then, dead centre, the glint of light on the coin about to be placed into the hand of the girl. 

It's that highlighting, that play of light that is so characteristic about Vermeer. In The Milkmaid, the thin stream of milk being carefully poured from the jug is the focal point of the picture. But look around; the chunks of bread (she's preparing some sort of bread pudding, it seems) and the basket on the table are composed of hundreds of dots of light. And then you notice the reflections on the rims of the utensils and the glazed jug. The maid has pulled back her sleeves for this job, and you can appreciate just how pale the normally covered parts of her forearms are. And what about those Delft tiles that make up the skirting board? Even the plain wall has detail.... the graduation of the shadow in the corner, the nail and pitted mark in it. Such precision and detail on a canvas that is less than a half a metre square.

It's perhaps only in this show that you appreciate how small many of Vermeer's works are. Spaced far apart on the Rijksmuseum's exhibition floor, they appear even more jewel-like than you imagined. 

Take The Lacemaker: It's just 24 centimetres by 21. In this painting the astonishment comes from the threads that pour out of the work box on the left, in what is an incredible rendering of the tools and materials the woman is using. Spots of white pick out highlights on the collar and her work. Unusually for Vermeer, the light is coming in from the right; his characters are normally illuminated from a window on the left.

The Lacemaker is displayed in a room with a number of other dainty images of women on their own, including the Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, one of the few Vermeers left in private hands. 

She's quite demure, even though she's looking straight at you. Not so the Girl with a Red Hat, lips slightly parted. These aren't portraits, though, they're what the Dutch call tronies, character studies, and they're leading up at the end of this room to another tronie, the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

One of the most famous paintings in the world, it's only staying at the Rijkmuseum until the end of March. On April 1, it'll be back in the Mauritshuis. Bizarrely, we've been in the gallery in The Hague many a time and had it almost all to ourselves. Not here.

It's the most stripped-down of Vermeer's paintings -- no background, no props, just the girl, looking at you over her shoulder, the highlights on her lips and eyes and, naturally, the earring, amid the shimmering yellow and blue of the gown and headdress. It's such a seductive picture. 

There aren't that many men in Vermeer's paintings -- Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the dodgy-looking individuals in The Procuress, and also on show here from his later period, The Geographer, a figure caught in thought, looking up from his map in a most Vermeer-like room, the light coming in from the elaborate window on the left, the intricate table covering, and another map on the wall. The Astronomer, a quite similarly constructed painting, hasn't been lent by the Louvre, and nor has the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna sent The Art of Painting to Amsterdam; it's perhaps the picture you'll most miss in this show. 

But there are many gems, with familiar Dutch Golden Age themes: servants with letters for their mistresses, for example. Meaningful looks are exchanged. But we don't know the story; we can only guess at the import.

Was the letter Vermeer's favourite prop? To be sure, he made quite a lot of pictures of women playing musical instruments, but they don't exude quite the same fascination. As well as the Mistress and Maid above, there's the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window from Dresden and the Rijksmuseum's own blue-clad Woman Reading a Letter. And then in the Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid, the maidservant stares out the window, perhaps waiting for someone. There's a red seal on the floor in front of the table, and what could be a letter-writing manual.

Most theatrically, The Love Letter offers us an image of the woman of the house interrupted in her music, just having been handed a sealed letter by her maid, who's wearing something of a knowing look. The painting within the painting, on the wall behind, is a seascape; the sea was often compared to love, and a ship to a lover, in the 17th century. The whole scene is glimpsed from afar, in another room.

There's another message to be discovered in the background of the picture below, the Woman Holding a Balance. The Last Judgement on the wall serves as a warning to the young woman absorbed in weighing her jewels to estimate their worth. The lesson is that material wealth won't get you to Heaven when souls are weighed on judgement day. 

Today it's hard to credit that Vermeer did not enjoy great wealth -- he was master of the artists' guild and appeared to depict such choice materials, though he may well have used glass earrings, not pearls, and that ermine is more likely to be rabbit fur. Vermeer and his wife had many children; the art market collapsed in the years before his death and his widow had to use paintings he left to pay the baker's bill. 

For one last picture, let's luxuriate in another warning against vanity, a woman admiring her pearl necklace in the mirror, in the sort of gorgeous fur-trimmed yellow jacket that pops up again and again in Vermeer's work. 

It's quintessential Vermeer; the light streaming in from the window on the left, throwing complicated shadows on the walls and the furnishings; the shining studs fixing the upholstery to the chair and the gleam on that pot on the left; the stunning rendering of materials. This is what we think of as the reality of 17th-century Holland. It is, and it isn't; this is the artist's constructed reality, but these are intriguing and beautiful paintings, and they take you completely away from the present to Vermeer's world. He didn't paint many of them, and you may never get the chance to see them all together again, so if more tickets become available, book them immediately and get yourself to Amsterdam. You surely won't regret it.  

Practicalities

Vermeer runs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until June 4. The exhibition is currently open daily from 0900 to 1800, with lates on Thursday, Friday and Saturday until 2200. Full-price tickets are 30 euros, including admission to the main Rijksmuseum collection, which you can visit after you've toured the show, though the rest of the museum is not open in the evenings. We took about 1 3/4 hours to go round the exhibition. 

The gallery is situated in the museum quarter in the south-west of the city centre and is easily accessible by tram, using Vijzelgracht Metro station or via a direct bus from Schiphol airport. If you're coming from outside the city, it's a half-hour walk from Amsterdam Centraal station or, more pleasantly in our opinion, Amsterdam Zuid (taking you past the Hilton, scene of John and Yoko's bed-in). 9292.nl is an excellent site that gives you public-transport connections across the Netherlands.

While you're in the Rijksmuseum

Visit the Gallery of Honour for the museum's line-up of the greatest works from its Dutch Golden Age collection, minus the Vermeers at the moment. Pride of place goes, of course, to Rembrandt's The Night Watch, currently being restored live in situ behind a glass screen. 

Images

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), The Milkmaid, 1658-59, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, 1666-68, Musée du Louvre, Paris 

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, c. 1670-72, Leiden Collection, New York
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1664-67, Mauritshuis, The Hague

Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, c. 1665-67, The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1662-64, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Johannes Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, c. 1662-64, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin