Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, New York, Dutton, 2000; 242 pages, $21.95 hardcover. - Review - book review

Art in America, March, 2001 by Gary Schwartz

Schumacher supplements these statements with her own answer to the question "why Vermeer?":

Vermeer frequently painted women alone in quiet interiors, writing letters to unknown recipients or casting glances toward unknown subjects. These psychological moments, with clues that only hint at the full meaning of the paintings, invite interpretation.(2)

The appearance of these book-length daydreams on themes by Vermeer in 1999 and 2000 follows (as effect from cause?) the Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995-96. The crowds drawn by the show are said to have been moved more deeply and directly than by most exhibitions. The artist whom Zbigniew Herbert called the Great Mute did not talk back to visitors, allowing them to leave the exhibition with their own thoughts and emotions flatteringly intertwined with his timeless images.

Reasons other than the Vermeer mystique also come to mind. The books betray a yearning for old-fashioned authenticity. Real love, real honor, real danger, true belief and authentic art. The love affairs in 17th-century Delft and Amsterdam are not, for these writers, like those in trimillennial Westchester or Manhattan. Secret love in Old Holland was not the noncommittal matter it mainly is in modern fiction. Griet and Sophia risk their lives by considering or committing adultery. Griet and Vreeland's Magdalena are consumed with fear of another distinctly pre-2000 destiny: disgrace. Griet is sure that if she ever unfastens her hair she will be taken for a whore for the rest of her life, and Magdalena is "seared" with disgrace when a painting for which she modeled is not bought by van Ruijven.

The authors have convinced themselves that the Dutch Republic was a world in which honor was for real. More to the point--so was art. This was especially the case with genre painting, with its depiction of everyday life and, within genre painting, particularly the household life of women. In another of those passages for which one could find a close equivalent in the other novels as well, Vreeland puts into Vermeer's mouth this speech concerning a glass of milk: "It makes the whole corner sacred with the tenderness of just living." Elsewhere she writes: "What he saw ... was ... stillness from the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home. That stillness today, he thought, might be all he would ever know of the Kingdom of Heaven." Not only do the painters look this way, so do the heroines of the books by the female novelists. They compete with their artist heroes as lookers, demonstrating their visual as well as emotional sensitivity. Vermeer provides an instrument for an intensified experience of present-day reality.

Katharine Weber, in her novel The Music Lesson--which I found much better than the other four, in part because the 1990s action (the stealing of a Vermeer by an Irish terrorist group with the aid of a librarian at the Frick Collection) precludes jarring anachronisms--is unembarrassed about putting this effect into simple words: "There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances.... But there is always intimacy, the intimacy of experience without pretension."