Vermeer
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Vermeer Details
About the Author CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT is a distinguished art historian, who specialises in seventeenth-century painting and is a world authority on Vermeer. He graduated from the University of Leeds and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and has subsequently written over twenty volumes including monographs of Georges de la Tour (1974 with Benedict Nicolson), Poussin (1985), and Rembrandt (2000). He has also published articles in many art periodicals including The Burlington Magazine. Read more
Reviews
Christopher Wright is notable today because he was, in 1976, the year this volume first appeared, one of the few expert commentators to list the fugitive Lady at the Virginals as an authentic Vermeer. Although most art historians for much of the first half of the twentieth century had also placed this work in Vermeer's canon, few did so after the infamous Han van Meegeren Vermeer forgeries were brought to light after 1948; the painting seemed too sodden for Vermeer's atmospheric conjuries. But after considerable forensis analysis, and a marvelous cleaning and restoration, the painting has recently been authenticated as an autograph Vermeer, seemingly validating Wright's artistic sensibility. However, the weight of Wright's scholarship in this second edition suggests that sensibility remains generally far off the mark.Wright's Vermeer is rife with too many bad reproductions, casually sloppy errors, and outright loopy attributions. The book merits two stars because of a good cover portrayal of The Girl with a Pearl Earring, a helpful Catalog of Vermeer Paintings, which lists the provenance, literature, and exhibition history of each work, and a brief commentary about and a so-so reproduction of A Lady at the Virginals, the first contemporary book on Vermeer to do so. Otherwise, there is little to applaud and much to condemn.Take, for example, Wright's off the wall suggestion that Vermeer actually painted over an original Hendrich ter Brugghen work, Athenais Banished by Her Husband, in order, early in his career, to pass the painting off as his own. Moreover, based upon the the risky premise that a painting called St. Praxedis was by Vermeer, Wright blithely but ridiculously maintains that two other religiously-themed works, Christ Healing the Blind Man and The Magdelene at the Foot of the Cross, belong to Vermeer. No matter that new (in 1999) information about Vermeer's early work, Diana and her Companions, has essentially disqualified St. Praxedis from being attributed to Vermeer. No matter virtually no stylistic links exist between Vermeer's other early work, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, one of only two paintings with an expressly religious theme in Vermeer's oeuvre, and the paintings cited by Wright. It is as if Wright needed to confirm his thesis that the young Vermeer was a devote of Italianate art and artistic influences, while also infused with religious ferver--and manufactured evidence in support of this thesis. No other serious Vermeer scholar has ever published such errant nonsense.Then consider just a few of the author's many outright gaffes. He states that, although Vermeer was born in 1632, the artist registered as a painter in the Delft Guild at the age of twenty-three in 1653; in actuality, Vermeer had just turned twenty-one. Wright also describes the beautiful curtain draped over the foreground of Vermeer's signature works, The Art of Painting, as appearing "only in his last pictures." In fact, Vermeer used the device very dramatically in one of his early paintings, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, which Wright himself took pains to point out.Those who want genuinely responsible scholarship about Johannes Vermeer should consult Walter Liedtke's magisterial 200l Vermeer and the Delft School; Arthur Wheelock's 1995 Vermeer and the Art of Painting; and John Michael Montias' formidable Vermeer and His Milieu. For those who want more information about the St. Praxedis misattribution, read Liedtke's A View of Delft: Vermeer and His Contemporaries.