People in Rooms

At every opportunity John Ruskin, the preeminent art connoisseur and critic of the nineteenth century, savagely reviled seventeenth-century Dutch painting. On the other hand Marcel Proust more than once called Vermeer's View of Delft (c. 1660–61) "the most beautiful picture in the world" and Vermeer "the greatest painter." Can such contradictory responses be reconciled? Certainly not by trotting out the cliché about beauty and the eyes of beholders.

One of the many reasons that Vermeer's paintings hold our interest is their depiction of the act of holding. It could be argued that a majority of the greatest paintings in the history of Western art show someone holding something or someone: baby Jesus clearly the favorite; Christ crucified the runner-up; and in third place—a crowded field—staffs, staves, canes, rods, scepters, and, most especially, weapons. Vermeer trafficked in none of the above. Here's a list, close to exhaustive, of the items being held in Vermeer's paintings (of which only thirty-five to forty are known to exist): a hand, a breast, a foot, a head; a letter, a cross, a book; a glass, a pitcher, a basket of bread; a strand of pearls, a piece of lace, a coin; a pen or quill, a brush, a maulstick, a balance, a geometer's compass; a trumpet, a lute, a guitar. A pose. Our gaze.

As this list suggests and as Ruth Bernard Yeazell makes abundantly clear in her study of the influence of Dutch painting on realist novels, it was the humanity, the ordinariness, the domesticity, of the work of a dozen or so Dutch (and Flemish) artists that proved both appealing and inspiring to Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust—to name only the masterly writers whom Yeazell considers most essential and instructive. Those very same qualities filled Ruskin with contempt—and he was by no means alone. Dutch painting did not come into its own until the nineteenth century (soon after the novel began to become respectable) and only then through the efforts of the brilliant French critic Théophile Thoré and the admiration and emulation of French and British novelists eager to convey in words that even the most humble and quotidian of lives have their own dignity, even beauty. These writers would inevitably learn that their ambitions had limits and entailed sacrifice with regard to narrative, style, and theme. Perhaps only Proust achieved a seamless and sustained blend of story, character, and evocative pictorial detail.

Yeazell documents her thesis with skill, erudition, and elegance. In some cases the evidence is specific and explicit: George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859), incorporated a virtual manifesto in defense of Dutch painting. Thomas Hardy subtitled Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) "A Rural Painting of the Dutch School." Other instances are more subtle but no less significant: In his first published book, Les plaisers et les jours (1896), Marcel Proust wrote, "We have certain recollections that resemble the Dutch painting of our memory." In sum the evidence is undeniable and felicitous.

I now will take a different tack and press Yeazell's case beyond the point to which she takes it. Modern painters and writers lie outside the bounds of her study; but the influence of Dutch painting does not end with the nineteenth century. As Anne Hollander argues brilliantly in Moving Pictures (1989), present-day art, literature, and movies "are still engaging with certain painters of the past," perhaps especially those of Northern Europe in the seventeenth century.

During much of the twentieth century, realistic paintings of note were in short supply; but two artists, now generally recognized as major figures, shared with Vermeer a strong attraction to the subject of people in rooms—not to people placed in rooms for the purpose of portraits but to people living in rooms to which they belong and which belong to them. I am referring to Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, each of whom is as different from the other as...