The Vermeer exhibit that took place last year at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was the largest and most comprehensive ever assembled of the Dutch master. The museum sold more than half a million tickets (some via online lotteries), and had to extend its hours to 2 a.m. to accommodate demand. I was able to go only because a friend from San Francisco had to cancel her trip. A long way to travel for an exhibit, you might think, but Americans alone would account for 14 percent of international sales.
According to Benjamin Moser in his new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, the lasting appeal of the Dutch Golden Age is unsurprising: it’s when all of the hallmarks of the modern era—liberalism, secularism, capitalism—take root. Paintings from the period depict scenes of commerce and society, family and tavern life—a world simpler than our own, yet very much its precursor. This helps explain why, beyond the Vermeer exhibition, there was a blockbuster retrospective of Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London last year, and in 2019 at the Rijksmuseum a whole “Year of Rembrandt.”
The Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672) reached its peak with the cessation of the Eighty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ushered in a period of discovery, conquest and prosperity. The Dutch Republic became renowned as a refuge for intellectuals from across Europe fleeing political or religious persecution. René Descartes lived there from 1628 to 1649; John Locke from 1683 to 1689. Thomas Hobbes had his books printed there. The Upside-Down World positions the Dutch Revolt of 1566 at the start of a sequence of revolutions—including the English Civil War of the 1640s and the American Revolutionary War of the 1770s—over the assertion of rights. “The Dutch wanted to be independent politically,” Moser writes, “to practice their own religion, to shake off tyrannical kings … [They] refused to be enslaved.”
Moser’s book takes an ambitious slate of painters—household names like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but also lesser-known greats like Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch—and stitches them together into a group portrait that feels distinctly contemporary. These artists avoided the dusty religious or mythological themes that dominated art of the time in favor of more pressing subjects: new advances in medicine, engineering and cartography; the simple politics of everyday life.
Take, for example, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which features a group of doctors surrounding a cadaver. The painting highlights themes of secular education and medical progress, but Moser also shows how Rembrandt painted the everyday as a substitute for the religious. The lowly cadaver sits in the center of the canvas, occupying the same place where Christ was set in earlier ecclesiastical paintings. This inversion of sacred and profane was common in Rembrandt’s work. In The Prodigal Son in the Brothel (1635), his take on the biblical tale, Rembrandt painted himself and his wife Saskia in a bawdy tavern scene—a clear snubbing of convention.
Rembrandt marks the beginning of a line of artists who sought to eliminate the allusions that plagued Christian art by placing ordinary people in quotidian settings. This move was already to some degree present in the Italian Renaissance, with Caravaggio’s use of beggars and prostitutes as models in his religious paintings. But, as Moser puts it, “the dirty feet in his paintings still belonged to saints, and his hookers were still meant to represent the Magdalene.” In Dutch masterworks, the subject had flipped. Soldiers were depicted as soldiers; prostitutes as prostitutes. “Their theme,” Moser writes of the intellectual novelty of these paintings, “was everyday life.”
In Dutch Golden Age art, the normal is odd, and the extraordinary is ordinary. The saying in Moser’s title—“upside-down world”—derives from a Dutch expression, “de omgekeerde wereld or de wereld op zijn kop [the world stood on its head],” used to describe “when the normal order of things is reversed.” Carel Fabritius’s famous painting, The Goldfinch (1654), is a good example. It is a simple portrait of a bird chained to its feeding box. “Nothing about it should make it unforgettable—but it is unforgettable,” Moser writes.
What makes these paintings so recognizable is that their ordinary is our ordinary too. No one better exemplifies this than Vermeer, whose work foregrounds individual subjectivity, especially in its modern, secular form. This comes out clearly in his use of light—crisp, outrageous even, often streaming in from an open window—which casts his subjects into relief and lifts them from their settings. In The Milkmaid (ca. 1657-58), a woman, front-lit, pours milk from a jug; the backdrop behind her is bare. Originally a rack had been affixed to the wall, which Vermeer later painted over. He preferred the contrast of his subject’s body against the plain wall, bringing her out of the clutter and into the light.
This highlighting of the individual reaches its apotheosis in Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665). The painting doesn’t depict a particular person but rather a tronie, a character study rather than a recognizable portrait, set against a pure black canvas. By divorcing the subject from any context, Vermeer was distilling something essential about personhood. In being any girl, the Girl is every girl. She lives in our era as much as Vermeer’s. As Moser points out, these paintings aren’t about anything. What is on offer is an early expression of cultural norms that are also our own.
●
After moving to Amsterdam in 2017, I began to visit the Rijksmuseum frequently. When you live in a city, you appreciate its collections in a different way. You start to have favorites—it’s no longer a love for Rembrandt but a love for particular Rembrandts. You become familiar with the other names: the van Eycks and van Leydens, the Bols and Steens. A museum, once you come to know it, begins to feel like a home. Walking into the main hall, I anticipate the smiling eyes of the girl who peeks at me from around a corner; the hysterical flutter of a warring swan.
The experience of Americans coming to terms with Dutch art in self-reflective ways is a recurring theme in 21st-century American literature. Take, for instance, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), named after the aforementioned painting by Carel Fabritius. The book follows Theo, a young American, as he struggles to find his place in our modern world; the bird—a light, almost weightless creature affixed to a feeding post—becomes symbolic of these travails. The painting is so magical, Theo narrates, one barely notices “the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.” For Tartt, The Goldfinch is not so much an illustration of a bird as an inverted portrait of us: modern subjects, bearing the shackles of our own putative freedom. “It’s hard not to see the human in the finch,” Tartt writes. “One prisoner looking at another.”
The interplay of freedom and constraint also features in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies (2021), which follows a young woman who moves to The Hague and tries to find her bearings in a new life abroad. Wandering about the Mauritshuis, she discovers a painting that speaks to her: Man Offering Money to a Young Woman (1631) by Judith Leyster. What strikes her is how contemporary its rendering of gendered social dynamics is—especially poignant in the wake of the #MeToo movement. “This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world.”
Like looking in a funhouse mirror, Dutch art presents us with our own image reflected back to us, familiar but also distorted; a bit sinister too. Consider Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657), which features a girl alone in her room, clutching a letter. She is dressed in a simple frock; her hair is in a bun, with blond ringlets falling before her ears. The significance of the letter is palpable; as viewers, we are immediately drawn to her downward stare. But as we expand our gaze, we see her face again, this time reflected in the glass of the open window. The slight warping changes its contours. Her eyes seem heavier now; the shadows beneath her cheeks almost skeletal. And so, by the brilliance of the artist, we experience the depth of her emotional state, the darkness that accompanies the light. Looking at this image today, one encounters not merely the beauty of Vermeer’s craftsmanship, but something familiar from our own era—the individual adrift in society; a dialectic of love and loneliness.
In The Wine Glass (1660), Vermeer depicts the courting and the courted together in a small room. He, in a wide-rimmed hat and a flowing green robe, stands somewhat in the shadows (perhaps a moral reflection). She, front-lit in a pink dress with gold lacework and a white head covering, buries her face in a glass of wine. The man’s expression is encouraging. His right hand holds a carafe, ready to offer another drink. Perhaps she is thinking: if I drink this, he will be impressed. Or instead: if I drink this, all of it, down to the last drop, perhaps he will go away. One hand is laid modestly across her midriff, the other grips the glass, pinky raised ever so slightly. So much acculturation accompanies this pose, emblematic of the same politics of patriarchy and patronage we see in Leyster—modern society’s strictures and traps.
●
At the vaunted Girl with a Pearl Earring, I found myself standing behind a family of four, snapping photos and recreating her fateful gaze on their phones. I took a picture too, not of the Girl, exactly, but of the simulacrum: the Girl replicated on these miniature screens, and beyond that, the Girl herself. Such is how it is in the contemporary museum. The experience is perverse, but in another sense perhaps this is how Dutch art was meant to be viewed.
After all, the still life and the Instagram photo are but links in a centuries-long chain. Inherent in today’s portraits taken at the perfect angle is an insecurity about the world and our tenuous place in it. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in photographs of food. These are still lifes too, in a way, just like the kind the Dutch masters painted. But they take an impoverished form: these days we conceal inconvenient truths rather than acknowledge them. Lost is the shadowy underside of beauty; the chain affixed to the finch’s feet.
That is what the Dutch masters bring us: an honest glance at the contradictions of a world that is demonstrably ours, but that many might wish to escape. We will keep returning to their art, I would hazard, until we do.
The Vermeer exhibit that took place last year at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was the largest and most comprehensive ever assembled of the Dutch master. The museum sold more than half a million tickets (some via online lotteries), and had to extend its hours to 2 a.m. to accommodate demand. I was able to go only because a friend from San Francisco had to cancel her trip. A long way to travel for an exhibit, you might think, but Americans alone would account for 14 percent of international sales.
According to Benjamin Moser in his new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, the lasting appeal of the Dutch Golden Age is unsurprising: it’s when all of the hallmarks of the modern era—liberalism, secularism, capitalism—take root. Paintings from the period depict scenes of commerce and society, family and tavern life—a world simpler than our own, yet very much its precursor. This helps explain why, beyond the Vermeer exhibition, there was a blockbuster retrospective of Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London last year, and in 2019 at the Rijksmuseum a whole “Year of Rembrandt.”
The Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672) reached its peak with the cessation of the Eighty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ushered in a period of discovery, conquest and prosperity. The Dutch Republic became renowned as a refuge for intellectuals from across Europe fleeing political or religious persecution. René Descartes lived there from 1628 to 1649; John Locke from 1683 to 1689. Thomas Hobbes had his books printed there. The Upside-Down World positions the Dutch Revolt of 1566 at the start of a sequence of revolutions—including the English Civil War of the 1640s and the American Revolutionary War of the 1770s—over the assertion of rights. “The Dutch wanted to be independent politically,” Moser writes, “to practice their own religion, to shake off tyrannical kings … [They] refused to be enslaved.”
Moser’s book takes an ambitious slate of painters—household names like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but also lesser-known greats like Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch—and stitches them together into a group portrait that feels distinctly contemporary. These artists avoided the dusty religious or mythological themes that dominated art of the time in favor of more pressing subjects: new advances in medicine, engineering and cartography; the simple politics of everyday life.
Take, for example, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which features a group of doctors surrounding a cadaver. The painting highlights themes of secular education and medical progress, but Moser also shows how Rembrandt painted the everyday as a substitute for the religious. The lowly cadaver sits in the center of the canvas, occupying the same place where Christ was set in earlier ecclesiastical paintings. This inversion of sacred and profane was common in Rembrandt’s work. In The Prodigal Son in the Brothel (1635), his take on the biblical tale, Rembrandt painted himself and his wife Saskia in a bawdy tavern scene—a clear snubbing of convention.
Rembrandt marks the beginning of a line of artists who sought to eliminate the allusions that plagued Christian art by placing ordinary people in quotidian settings. This move was already to some degree present in the Italian Renaissance, with Caravaggio’s use of beggars and prostitutes as models in his religious paintings. But, as Moser puts it, “the dirty feet in his paintings still belonged to saints, and his hookers were still meant to represent the Magdalene.” In Dutch masterworks, the subject had flipped. Soldiers were depicted as soldiers; prostitutes as prostitutes. “Their theme,” Moser writes of the intellectual novelty of these paintings, “was everyday life.”
In Dutch Golden Age art, the normal is odd, and the extraordinary is ordinary. The saying in Moser’s title—“upside-down world”—derives from a Dutch expression, “de omgekeerde wereld or de wereld op zijn kop [the world stood on its head],” used to describe “when the normal order of things is reversed.” Carel Fabritius’s famous painting, The Goldfinch (1654), is a good example. It is a simple portrait of a bird chained to its feeding box. “Nothing about it should make it unforgettable—but it is unforgettable,” Moser writes.
What makes these paintings so recognizable is that their ordinary is our ordinary too. No one better exemplifies this than Vermeer, whose work foregrounds individual subjectivity, especially in its modern, secular form. This comes out clearly in his use of light—crisp, outrageous even, often streaming in from an open window—which casts his subjects into relief and lifts them from their settings. In The Milkmaid (ca. 1657-58), a woman, front-lit, pours milk from a jug; the backdrop behind her is bare. Originally a rack had been affixed to the wall, which Vermeer later painted over. He preferred the contrast of his subject’s body against the plain wall, bringing her out of the clutter and into the light.
This highlighting of the individual reaches its apotheosis in Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665). The painting doesn’t depict a particular person but rather a tronie, a character study rather than a recognizable portrait, set against a pure black canvas. By divorcing the subject from any context, Vermeer was distilling something essential about personhood. In being any girl, the Girl is every girl. She lives in our era as much as Vermeer’s. As Moser points out, these paintings aren’t about anything. What is on offer is an early expression of cultural norms that are also our own.
●
After moving to Amsterdam in 2017, I began to visit the Rijksmuseum frequently. When you live in a city, you appreciate its collections in a different way. You start to have favorites—it’s no longer a love for Rembrandt but a love for particular Rembrandts. You become familiar with the other names: the van Eycks and van Leydens, the Bols and Steens. A museum, once you come to know it, begins to feel like a home. Walking into the main hall, I anticipate the smiling eyes of the girl who peeks at me from around a corner; the hysterical flutter of a warring swan.
The experience of Americans coming to terms with Dutch art in self-reflective ways is a recurring theme in 21st-century American literature. Take, for instance, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), named after the aforementioned painting by Carel Fabritius. The book follows Theo, a young American, as he struggles to find his place in our modern world; the bird—a light, almost weightless creature affixed to a feeding post—becomes symbolic of these travails. The painting is so magical, Theo narrates, one barely notices “the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.” For Tartt, The Goldfinch is not so much an illustration of a bird as an inverted portrait of us: modern subjects, bearing the shackles of our own putative freedom. “It’s hard not to see the human in the finch,” Tartt writes. “One prisoner looking at another.”
The interplay of freedom and constraint also features in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies (2021), which follows a young woman who moves to The Hague and tries to find her bearings in a new life abroad. Wandering about the Mauritshuis, she discovers a painting that speaks to her: Man Offering Money to a Young Woman (1631) by Judith Leyster. What strikes her is how contemporary its rendering of gendered social dynamics is—especially poignant in the wake of the #MeToo movement. “This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world.”
Like looking in a funhouse mirror, Dutch art presents us with our own image reflected back to us, familiar but also distorted; a bit sinister too. Consider Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657), which features a girl alone in her room, clutching a letter. She is dressed in a simple frock; her hair is in a bun, with blond ringlets falling before her ears. The significance of the letter is palpable; as viewers, we are immediately drawn to her downward stare. But as we expand our gaze, we see her face again, this time reflected in the glass of the open window. The slight warping changes its contours. Her eyes seem heavier now; the shadows beneath her cheeks almost skeletal. And so, by the brilliance of the artist, we experience the depth of her emotional state, the darkness that accompanies the light. Looking at this image today, one encounters not merely the beauty of Vermeer’s craftsmanship, but something familiar from our own era—the individual adrift in society; a dialectic of love and loneliness.
In The Wine Glass (1660), Vermeer depicts the courting and the courted together in a small room. He, in a wide-rimmed hat and a flowing green robe, stands somewhat in the shadows (perhaps a moral reflection). She, front-lit in a pink dress with gold lacework and a white head covering, buries her face in a glass of wine. The man’s expression is encouraging. His right hand holds a carafe, ready to offer another drink. Perhaps she is thinking: if I drink this, he will be impressed. Or instead: if I drink this, all of it, down to the last drop, perhaps he will go away. One hand is laid modestly across her midriff, the other grips the glass, pinky raised ever so slightly. So much acculturation accompanies this pose, emblematic of the same politics of patriarchy and patronage we see in Leyster—modern society’s strictures and traps.
●
At the vaunted Girl with a Pearl Earring, I found myself standing behind a family of four, snapping photos and recreating her fateful gaze on their phones. I took a picture too, not of the Girl, exactly, but of the simulacrum: the Girl replicated on these miniature screens, and beyond that, the Girl herself. Such is how it is in the contemporary museum. The experience is perverse, but in another sense perhaps this is how Dutch art was meant to be viewed.
After all, the still life and the Instagram photo are but links in a centuries-long chain. Inherent in today’s portraits taken at the perfect angle is an insecurity about the world and our tenuous place in it. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in photographs of food. These are still lifes too, in a way, just like the kind the Dutch masters painted. But they take an impoverished form: these days we conceal inconvenient truths rather than acknowledge them. Lost is the shadowy underside of beauty; the chain affixed to the finch’s feet.
That is what the Dutch masters bring us: an honest glance at the contradictions of a world that is demonstrably ours, but that many might wish to escape. We will keep returning to their art, I would hazard, until we do.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.