Stop and Look: The Allegory of Painting by Vermeer

The much-heralded Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam last year didn’t include this painting and its absence wasn’t mentioned in the accompanying, equally well-publicised film. I found this odd, since it is, in my view, the greatest of all Vermeer’s interiors. No doubt there were good reasons, probably to do with its physical condition, but to omit even a mention of this wonderful work seemed perverse and tended to denigrate the artist. 

True, it doesn’t slot neatly into the pigeonholes that usually cover his output. It’s not an architectural view – of which there are only two – nor an interior with conversing, or music-making, or chore-performing figures. It belongs in a small group of imaginary portraits of intellectual types: an astronomer and a geographer represent two of the areas of expanding knowledge in which Holland played conspicuous roles in the artist’s lifetime. There’s another

 “Allegory” depicting “Faith” and celebrating specifically the Catholic religion, but in placing a group of symbolic objects in a domestic interior some of the needed intensity of feeling is lost. 

By contrast, the two figures in the Allegory of Painting seem perfectly at home in a light-filled room, with a sumptuous curtain drawn back to reveal the group: the artist, in an outfit echoing the black-and-white titled floor–flamboyant black jacket and trunks with a white shirt and stockings round his ankles (even in the seventeenth century, it seems, artists had a reputation for dressing casually) is seated at his easel and painting in the head of his model. She wears the laurel wreath of the muse of history, Clio. That identification is confirmed by the brass trumpet she holds, signifying Fame, and by the heavy tome she also carries (a volume of the great ancient historian Thucydides). 

On the wall behind her hangs a large map of the United Netherlands, a political entity that was coeval with the scientific revolution emerging in the cities whose panoramas are engraved in the margin around the map of the country. In one of these cities, Delft, Vermeer had been born and pursued his career. His message in this allegory seems to be that a painter, even of unambitious scenes like this, can contribute to the scientific and artistic flowering of the new state.   

 Another “prop” in the picture is the huge plaster head lying on the table in front of the model. It is part of a foreshortened line of objects, from the curtain and nearby chair in the foreground to the clutter of items on the table-top, culminating with a thick book (another volume of Thucydides?) standing on its end. But as in so many of Vermeer’s canvases, the magic lies not only in the evocative assemblage of objects, but in the artist’s distinctive touch as a painter: each stroke an impasted dot with a three-dimensional, jewel-like presence that lends it an independent physical weight in the composition irrespective of its representational importance. The result is an almost tactile richness to the painted surface that is unique to Vermeer, and the secret of his position at the head of the school of “little Dutch masters”.

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