Vermeer's thingness

Scenes of much hope and patience on Trumpington Street: the last weekend of a small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, “Vermeer’s Women,” unleashed queues hundreds of yards long through its front galleries, with visitors waiting outside for an hour or more. Many didn’t get in and the show’s run won’t be extended. For one thing, the Queen wants her treasure back—she lent one of the extant 34 canvases (“The Music Lesson”) known to be by Vermeer—and so does the Louvre. The star of the show, “The Lacemaker,” which has never exhibited in Britain before, has to return to Paris.

Perhaps one shouldn’t wonder at the crowds, as anything with the name “Vermeer” in it is likely to have them banging at the gates. But there was something odd here. Of the show’s four Vermeers, one is HMQ’s, one the Louvre’s, and the third major piece,  “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” is in the National Gallery. All can be seen without much difficulty or great expense all year round. The fourth, a small, charming study for the latter, is in private hands and so, for me, was by far the most precious on display.

Despite the exhibition’s name, this wasn’t actually a Vermeer exhibition. But I do not quarrel with the curator Marjorie Wieseman’s subtitle. “Secrets and Silence” suggests that all the paintings illuminate something unexpected or intimate, and, contained by familiar domestic contexts, they do. Curating one of the great shows of the last decade, of Dutch portraiture in 2007, Dr Wieseman knows what she’s doing.

Could the other artists’ work in the exhibition explain the huge visitor numbers in Cambridge? The admittedly remarkable Gerard ter Borchs from Dresden, New York, Vienna and Helsinki; a Nicholas Maes of 1665, normally in London’s Mansion House; works by Esaias Boursse or Quiringh van Brokelenkam from Manchester, Amsterdam, Berlin? The names of these unshowy, preternaturally gifted 17th-century craftsmen by themselves hardly cause queues in the cold at 8.30am. It must have been word of mouth.

When viewers got to the upper gallery, what they saw was ordinariness, banality:  a woman removing a stocking, another playing a clavichord, another drinking wine; windows, curtains, fish, bobbins, needles, bricks; rugs, musical instruments, fine dresses, a kitten. Need there be more?

There is. These Dutch eyes had seen and transmitted through their brush-ends an immanent excitement about, a passionate concentration on, a world that had not before been represented: secrets and silence, for sure, but also the opposite of glory—a material defeat of public self-aggrandisement; an absence of religion; art free from allegory. This very west European universe is replete with the plain essence of things.

The Dutch republic, crucially, was underpinned by Erasmus’s humanism and the victory of the States General over spiteful foreign (Spanish) monarchy. So, then, was much of the period’s painting (the best of it over by the 1690s). These intense canvases speak to us powerfully of secularism, not exactly revolutionary now—because we recognise so much in them, we love them—and that, maybe, is what thousands since October have responded to.

Dutch painting can remind us of what we really are: small people—with, granted, a rich preponderance at the Fitzwilliam of women—just existing in the everyday. More of that this year? Well, landscapes by David Hockney, a painter adamant about art needing images, go on display this week at the Royal Academy. Like his Golden Age Dutch antecedents, those Yorkshire eyes have seen the thingness of the world. The miracle of its complex rendering is what painters trade in. That’s what thousands flock to. Photographers, and conceptualists everywhere, take note.