Did I feel smug when I got tickets to the blockbuster Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam? Sure, a bit. Less when I booked in January than after reviews started appearing, competing with superlatives: “One of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived” and “A once-in-a-lifetime experience.” I got smugger when I started reading it was impossible to book, even for bankers’ wives and gallery benefactors. “It’s become a kind of social failure not to have some hat to pull tickets from,” one writer explained, making me, theoretically, a social success for the first time ever.
But my scramble for tickets came from a place of existential panic. “Once in a lifetime” is a compelling – or terrifying – concept when you reach the middle of your own, and “never” becomes a realistic alternative. It’s hard not to get a touch of vertigo thinking about finite time and infinite possibility. I feel it especially with art, weirdly, since it’s hardly ephemeral. But there’s so much I want to see and so much I’ve missed. I discover incredible exhibitions, start plotting a visit, blink and they’re gone. It happened recently with one about Parisian women. I booked a Eurostar in a fit of sweaty Yolo, then life got in the way. Now I move my train booking regularly, admitting to myself that no, I won’t be going to Paris this month (the exhibition ended ages ago). But Vermeer got under my skin – it felt urgent, something I’d bitterly regret missing. I booked a ferry and planned a mad one-day dash, making my husband come even though he had no idea what we were visiting (he only asked about 15 minutes into the journey – there’s a man who will never be haunted by Fomo).
This next bit might be consoling if you didn’t snag tickets. We disembarked to relentless rain and limped along a clogged motorway to Amsterdam at a snail’s pace. When we finally arrived, we got lost in a maze of cycle paths and one-way systems, our happy anticipation fraying, Rijksmuseum time slot approaching. The car park was so startlingly expensive that every 10 minutes, my husband would say things like “That trip to the loo cost us €2.50.” The rain only got heavier. I wanted to look like a cosmopolitan sophisticate who goes to Amsterdam for exhibitions regularly, so I wore my good coat that doesn’t fasten (stupid) and new white trainers (stupider) and was sodden within minutes. When we took refuge in a shop, I trapped my finger in the door so badly I spent 10 minutes dance-crying in the street like a tantrumming toddler. Eventually, it got so cold and miserable we headed back to the ferry hours earlier than planned – a good thing, because the traffic was even worse.
And the Vermeer? We filed through the museum entrance in a crush of wet wool and cagoule, then entered a packed first room, visitors 10-deep in front of The Little Street. It’s an exquisitely quiet painting – ancient brick, delicate leaded windows, women and children absorbed in play and chores. I had been looking forward to it especially, but saw more of it on raised smartphone screens than in the flesh. The luminous View of Delft was reduced to a few clouds and rooftops over a sea of heads. Every room was chock-a-block, and half the crush were taking pictures of pictures, far worse quality than the free ultra-high-resolution images online. I even saw one man carefully photographing a postcard of the Girl with a Pearl Earring in the gift shop.
My husband found it hilarious. Others didn’t. An elegant Dutch man in a black poloneck glowered and disgustedly hissed, “This generation!” (he meant 2023, not Gen-Z – most photographers were older). I felt wistfully envious of the critics who got to see the exhibition near-empty, experiencing something so transcendental they sent thousands of us chasing after bucket-list sensations that became impossible to replicate.
Even so, if you stood patiently for long enough, you got your turn. There were moments, too, when the crowds in front of less famous paintings thinned to allow a few moments’ stillness and they were worth all the rain and expense, the ruined trainers and my blackening fingernail. I got that in front of The Love Letter, in which a woman and her maid pause to consider a letter, conspiratorially. The woman holding the letter wears that yellow satin jacket that Vermeer paints again and again, trimmed with fur you can almost feel under your fingertips. It’s framed so you’re peeping at them through a doorway and the discarded broom and kicked-off slippers feel so immediate and so ordinary.
Vermeer’s gift lies partly in capturing the sublime in the quotidian, the way a shaft of light or a patch of colour transfigures ordinary intimacy. He doesn’t paint once-in-a-lifetime stuff, but chores – sewing, cleaning or music practice. He paints his family, mainly: wife or daughter shrugging on the yellow jacket and sitting by the window to pose, again. It feels a bit ironic to have gone on a frenetic, slightly disappointing chase after a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be reminded that so much of life’s beauty resides in the everyday and the repetitive; the slow, steady heartbeat of domesticity. But I’m glad I did.
