The scene is unassuming – rinsed cobbles, whitewashed walls, a woman stitching in an open doorway as the Dutch gable facade ascends towards motionless clouds. Yet every visitor stands before it amazed. Perhaps the spell has something to do with the Advent calendar of open and yet to be opened windows, or the chain of absorbed and absorbing figures, or the abstract arrangement of frames and arches, or the brickwork that seems made of the very thing itself? The eyes and mind, beguiled, search the image for answers. How can Johannes Vermeer’s painting be so infinitely more beautiful than the scene it depicts?
The Little Street (c.1657) hangs at the beginning of one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived. Vermeer, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, brings together more of his paintings than ever before – and possibly ever again, given the cost and their fragility – 28 of the 37 known works. The show is superbly dramatic: a sequence of darkened chambers, where the paintings (like their subjects) appear sometimes alone, occasionally in twos or threes, each in its solo spotlight. The design reflects the revelatory aspect of Vermeer’s art at every turn.
