Vermeer’s Afterlives

Yale English professor Yeazell (Art of the Everyday) scrupulously chronicles how the influence of Dutch Baroque painter Johannes Vermeer, who was nearly forgotten after his death in 1675, has spread through art and culture. Though French art critic Theophile Thore is credited with “rescuing the painter from oblivion” upon seeing View of Delft and writing an 1866 article about the painting, Yeazell points out that a little-known dictionary of Netherlandish artists, which mentioned Vermeer and three of his paintings, was published by two Dutchmen decades earlier. Yeazell goes on to examine the ways the painter’s work influenced art, literature, and cinema through both overt “imitation” and the subtle “assimilation” of his aesthetic into the cultural imagination. (The light and composition in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, for example, recalls Vermeer’s “cinematic” style of obscuring the artist’s presence and illuminating only a slice of the composition.) She also discusses how gaps in the historical record of Vermeer’s career created openings for forgers like Han van Meegeren, whose Supper at Emmaus appeared to confirm the theory that Vermeer had painted religious works early on. Throughout, the author marshals rigorous analysis to show how the artists, filmmakers, writers, and critics who carried forward Vermeer’s “afterlives” have expanded, innovated, and sometimes transformed the meaning of his work. Serious admirers of the painter will want this on their bookshelves. (June)