Don’t Move

Jeremy Noel-Tod

• Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
  HarperCollins, 248 pp, £5.99, July 2000, ISBN 0 00 651320 4
• Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
  Review, 242 pp, £6.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 7472 6659 X
• A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now by Anthony Bailey
  Chatto, 288 pp, £16.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 7011 6913 3
• Vermeer's Camera by Philip Steadman
  Oxford, 207 pp, £17.99, February 2001, ISBN 0 19 215967 4

‘The nearest approach to this,’ I said, ‘would be a Vermeer.’

Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was trebly gifted – with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity admit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality.

Aldous Huxley’s suggestion, in The Doors of Perception, that to take mescalin is to see the world as Vermeer saw it is typical of the painter’s canonisation in the 20th century. Pater’s Romantic flight of fancy established da Vinci as an artistic visionary for late 19th-century aesthetes: the modern Impressionist turns to Vermeer. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater remarks of ‘Lady Lisa’ that she is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’; Ciaran Carson (Fishing for Amber, 1999) feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’.