Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire, illustrations by Bill Sanderson, New York, ReganBooks, 1999; 368 pages, $24 hardcover. - Review - book review

These sentimental explanations take me only so far, and they call for qualification. The direct observations and reactions the writers report no doubt took place, but they did not take place in a conceptual void. The terms they apply to Dutch art are clearly dependent on older appreciations, including critical writing and academic research. Although Vermeer was famously rediscovered by William Thore-Burger in the 1860s, that writer did not claim for him any higher rank in the history of art than a place in "that select company of the Dutch `little masters,' as their equal in every respect." The admiring comparisons that were drawn between Vermeer's work and that of the Impressionists, and their subsequent rise to immortality, elevated him to the first rank. By 1921, in his influential Histoire de l'art, Elie Faure wrote, "Vermeer painted even the shining silence that flows out from friendly things, even the welcome they extend to you.... No one has penetrated further into the intimacy of matter." Two years later, in A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says that his hero Swann's "own life appeared to him in one pan of a heavenly scales, while the other contained the little patch of wall so finely painted in yellow [by Vermeer in the View of Delft]. He felt he had foolishly given the first for the second."

Much writing on Vermeer from then until now, by critics and literary writers as well as art historians, consists of nothing more than rewordings of these exalted judgments and attempts to explain how Vermeer did it. Here, for instance, is Lawrence Gowing, 1960: "What Vermeer depicted was not palpable matter but the ungraspable world of the vision, an entirely autonomous world that surpasses reason." Herbert Read, 1967, in an article titled "The Serene Art of Vermeer," wrote: "It might be asked whether this is merely a coincidence, or whether there are qualities in Vermeer's work that appeal to the modern sensibility, and whether these are the same qualities that led to the previous neglect of his work? I would suggest that possibly there are three such qualities, and that those are precisely the qualities that combine to make Yermeer unique. They concern (1) design, (2) colour, and (3) a spiritual or metaphysical quality which for the moment we might call serenity."(3)

While the novelists swallow these mystical, ahistorical characterizations of Vermeer hook, line and sinker, they also nibble at the bait offered by less effusive scholarly work as well. Although Svetlana Alpers, in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), argues that Dutch artists were really looking at their subjects, as opposed to looking through them as a mere "arrangement to be painted," her focus on sheer visuality in Dutch art and her belittlement of the intellectual and moral values studied by Eddy de Jongh and other researchers helped shape the notion of Dutch art in these novels. In the household situations we find strong echoes of Schama's loving evocations of domesticity in The Embarrassment of Riches. Details about Vermeer's life and times come from John Michael Montias's rich book on the artist, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, 1989).(4)