Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum review: ‘one of the great art experiences’

“Everybody loves Vermeer,” said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. His paintings are “irresistible”: “the magical light, the air of perfection, the whispery moods, the intoxicating combinations of yellow and blue”. They are also very rare things indeed: Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) seems to have produced only about two paintings per year; it is thought that he completed about 45 in total, of which just 37 survive; three are disputed, and one has been missing since a robbery in 1990.

So it is a great coup that Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has managed to unite so many of them for this landmark exhibition. Seven years in the making, the show is easily the largest Vermeer retrospective ever, bringing together a full 28 of his paintings, from little-known early landscapes to world-famous masterpieces.

As scholarly as it is “relentlessly pleasing”, the event plunges the viewer into Vermeer’s world. The surprise is “how revolutionary” it all seems. We thought we knew Vermeer so well; but we didn’t. “Paradigm-shifting, brilliantly presented, cleverly designed, revelatory, intoxicating”, this is “one of the great art experiences of my lifetime”.

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The show is “perfectly argued” and “perfectly paced”, said Jason Farago in The New York Times. It requires no explanatory videos or comparative works to pad out its ten galleries, instead leaving us to focus on the paintings alone – and what paintings they are. The Milkmaid, for instance, stands just “18 inches tall”, but packs in a universe of ingeniously rendered detail: the titular maid pours milk into a vessel, her gaze concentrated; Vermeer perfectly captures the Delft tiles lining the floor, nails hammered into the walls and the bread rolls on the table, articulated with “proto-pointillist dabs”.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (which will only be on show here until 30 March) “has skin so seamlessly contoured she could give TikTok tutorials”; the pearl itself (probably made from glass) consists of little more than “two bare white strokes”. The scholarship is revelatory: we now know that Vermeer, a Catholic convert in the Protestant Netherlands, was far more influenced by his faith than previously understood. Indeed, he may well have worked with the aid of a camera obscura demonstrated to him by Jesuit priests in his native Delft.

For two centuries, Vermeer was an “art-world Cinderella”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. Although successful in his lifetime, he was all but forgotten thereafter. We owe his 19th century rediscovery to the Impressionists, and looking at the “crystalline, mysterious pictures” here, you can see why they championed him: for Vermeer, “paint was itself a subject”, and passages of detail in his work can appear almost abstract.

He also shared the Impressionist habit of repeatedly painting the same “beloved costumes and props”. His wife’s “fur-trimmed yellow jacket”, for example, figures in five works: in A Lady Writing; in Woman with a Pearl Necklace; and in Mistress and Maid. Vermeer creates an illusion of the real that is “more persuasive and enticing than reality itself”, an effect which suffuses almost every work here. This is an “unrepeatable exhibition”, perfectly showcasing “his vision of interiority and the eternal presence of things”.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (+31 20 6747 000, rijksmuseum.nl). Until 4 June