Exhibit of the week: Gabriel Metsu: 1629–1667

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through July 24

History hasn’t been kind to Gabriel Metsu, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. In the 17th century, the Dutch genre painter was “the gold standard of the Golden Age,” flattering the Amsterdam elite with poshly appointed courtship scenes. Jan Vermeer, by contrast, was an also-ran—a lesser Metsu. Flash forward three centuries and the tables have turned, as Vermeer’s paintings “bait blockbuster crowds” while Metsu hasn’t rated a single retrospective until this, the National Gallery’s “charming and conventional-wisdom-testing show.” Metsu was a gifted audience pleaser: Coy sexual innuendo always killed. In typical paintings, “comely men surprise elegant ladies at their dressing tables or music practice. They offer drinks and other enticements.” In one barely veiled proposition, a hunter presents a lady with his quarry’s warm flesh. You can see why 18th-century French collectors adored this jester.

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It was all going along so swimmingly, said Blake Gopnik in TheDailyBeast.com. Until the 19th century, “sophisticated audiences by far preferred Metsu’s detail-filled storytelling to Vermeer’s cryptic, detached observation.” They wanted to study the pictures’ clues, to solve their mysteries. In one densely layered canvas, Woman Reading a Letter, there’s a lot to ponder: “a lone slipper sitting unexplained in the foreground, a cute dog, a basket of laundry, a maid and a mistress and a painting,” all meant to pique curiosity. “Who sent the letter? What does it say? What is the maid’s view of things? And the dog’s?” In Vermeer’s hands, the scene would have been merely a scene, a snapshot of a moment in life. That, in short, is how Vermeer landed on top. With the rise of cameras, photo-realism became recognized as “a new modern norm,” and Vermeer had that quality in spades.

What the Delft master didn’t possess was the “supreme weirdness” found in Metsu’s best works, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. In his 20s, Metsu did a quirky portrait of himself as a hunter dressing after a swim. “The large, naked form takes up an unseemly amount of the pictorial space, and the hunter is not a sinewy Actaeon,” but “a somewhat lumpy man who seems on the cusp of robust early middle age.” That choice, in itself, is modern far beyond its time. In the spirit of contemporary performance art, the image asserts: “Here I am, Metsu—unveiled, unashamed, imperfect, and unflinching in my confrontation with my audience.”