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When you stand in front of a Vermeer,

it's like there's intense moments of happiness,

and time stands still.

He's such an incredible storyteller.

He's like a film director, long before film was invented.

The exhibition tries to get closer to Vermeer.

This means that you will be closer also to his thoughts, to his ideas.

And it's as if he has taken the most mundane thing

and transformed it,

transfigured it into something which feels completely magical.

MAN 1: Vermeer makes us realise what it is to be human.

And the intimacy is so direct that it gives you goose pimples.

An exhibition of Vermeer's paintings on this scale is unprecedented.

MAN 1: 'In the over 200 years of the Rijksmuseum,

'this is the first time that we organise

'a retrospective of Vermeer.'

There's relatively little known about Vermeer,

about the circumstances in which he lived.

There's no letters,

there's no diaries, there's no documents.

So, to get closer to the artist,

you have to see his paintings.

We know 37 paintings by Vermeer,

of which three, in the past, have been disputed.

But still, then, that's a small oeuvre, 37.

And through sources,

we know that he's probably painted about 40 to 45 paintings.

So, that's extremely few paintings.

And the amazing thing is that the quality is incredibly high.

So the question remains, how did he do it?

MAN 2: Looking at Vermeer,

you see that every single step he takes is on purpose.

And sometimes we are part of the story,

so he tries to involve us.

And, in other paintings, we see that we are somewhere

as a distant witness,

just peeking into a particular room

without being noticed by the protagonist in the painting.

And Vermeer is an artist who really...

Well, he uses light, he uses perspective, depth,

precise details at one-hand side, more blurry in the other parts.

Colour, I mean, if there is one painter where light is colour

and colour is light, it's Vermeer, and no-one else is doing that.

NARRATOR: Journey back in time to 1658.

This plain group of worn facades

tells the story of a little street in Delft.

Cracks in the masonry, peeling paint and white-washed walls

anchor a series of red brick houses positioned under a moody sky.

Painted with exquisite detail,

all seems very ordinary and calm in the little street.

Daily life articulated by a moment in time.

A large house dominates the scene,

as our eye runs along the street left to right,

like a musical score.

A black door is closed,

but our eye is drawn next door,

deep into an open alley where a woman is doing her chores.

Water trickles back towards us via a gutter,

a perfect perspective.

Children are absorbed, heads down in playful activity,

while another woman sits quietly in the doorway sewing.

The painting is beautifully rendered with an explosion of white dots.

Brickwork, foliage, rooftops

and that generous expanse of cloudy sky.

Everything is worthy of our attention.

The people living there seem to ignore us

or are minding their own business.

Some shutters are closed,

and windows are dark with nothing to see inside...

for now.

The little street is quiet, with a little glimpse of life.

WOMAN: He says, "You don't need to look at me. Wander by.

"This is just a little scene. Nothing to notice here."

And yet you pause and notice, and you will enter his world

with a subtlety and an intricacy and a delicacy

that I find actually unique in the art world.

It's such a quiet relationship,

and because it is so intricate and so intimate,

it's a relationship that enters your mind.

It's a sort of...

It's almost less a scene than a mood,

a mood that sediments down through your mind,

through your emotions, through your memories, perhaps.

And that's why he ranks so highly up the list of artists for me.

WOMAN: Prior to the exhibition, we did a lot of technical research,

so we wanted to know how Vermeer painted these paintings.

And indeed, there's no drawings we know of by Vermeer,

so he must develop his composition somewhere.

And we see all these traces in the paintings

that he really did that on the canvas while painting,

thinking, "Yeah, but this doesn't work, I'll change it."

So, we know, for example,

this woman that is now sitting in the doorway of the house,

she was first mirrored and put in the doorway next to the house.

There's other changes, like these two children on the pavement.

They were added at a really late stage in the painting process.

So, the pavement was already there, and then he thought,

"Maybe it's a bit empty or whatever."

Then he put these children in.

And then there's this red shutter on the right side of the painting,

which just rounds up the whole composition.

And that's actually a very late addition by Vermeer,

obviously, but a late addition to the painting.

So, there was no red shutter first,

and another little shutter was half open, which is now closed.

So, he did all these changes,

and he must have looked at the painting and the composition

and think, "I'm not quite there yet," or something like that,

and going on changing it until he's satisfied.

PIETER: When we're talking about the Netherlands,

it's a very urban country in the 17th century.

And one of these cities or towns in the Netherlands was Delft.

It was not big. It was not really small.

I think 25,000 inhabitants

in the time when Vermeer was raised as a young boy

in the 1630s and 1640s.

Thinking about Vermeer as a young boy,

the city as a scenery was part of his education

and part of the way he was raised.

It was his father who became an art dealer

who must have introduced him into paintings from...

well, from abroad, who came from Italy or France

or from other artists in the Netherlands as well.

So, as a young kid,

visual culture was already part of his training

far before the moment that he got a proper education.

And what we see happening at a certain moment,

he must have been ten or 12 or something like that,

he must have found a school nearby

where he was trained in writing and reading,

in maths, for example, but also in drawing.

And there was a drawing school really nearby,

just a few doors away from the house where he was born

at Voldersgracht in the centre of Delft.

PIETER: When I look at the View Of Delft,

I always have the feeling that I arrive after a long journey,

and then, all of a sudden, you're there in front of the city.

It's there, but there's water in between us

and the city in itself.

So you can't cross it immediately.

And then you start looking,

and then the whole profile of the town presents itself to us

as a, well, pretty rich city.

I mean, you see the church, the new church,

which is the bell tower in the background, for example.

We see the herring fleet,

so the boats at the water in the front.

The gates, I mean, those will be the gates that will open to us

once we have crossed the water as well.

So, there are single steps in the way we will proceed in a minute,

but now we're here and we have to wait.

And, right, that moment of waiting is crucial, I think,

to this painting as a cityscape

or a townscape in the 17th century in itself.

RACHEL: He takes a port

which normally would have been bustling and busy.

Delft would've been receiving goods and ships and people

from all over the world,

and it would've been a thriving place.

Vermeer chooses to paint it at some unearthly hour of the morning

when only a few early birds are up,

and they're standing gossiping on the quayside.

And you can all but hear just the nothing

but the lap of the water against the stones.

And yet in this very, very quiet world that he captures...

..where nothing really moves except one thing,

which is a thundercloud passing overhead,

the sky is something like two-thirds of the painting.

And there's this dark cloud passing,

and it casts the whole of the foreground of this picture

pretty much into shadow.

And yet, beyond it, as it passes, you see the glint of light

glowing down a canal where this cloud has passed.

Vermeer draws your eye gently down there,

and he draws you into that drama.

You know you will step into that city as you look.

And that's exactly how this exhibition works.

You are drawn very quietly into the world

of this sublime golden age Dutch master.

PIETER: What he's doing in the View Of Delft,

you really see the reflection of the buildings in the water

and the very long shadows, for example.

It's early in the tradition, or the new tradition,

of townscapes in the Netherlands,

but he seems to combine townscape painting

with landscape painting.

It's all there.

He really guides our eye into his composition.

So, there he's very much aware of who the beholder is.

That's Vermeer as the cinematographer to the max.

Light, dark, light, dark.

That kind of interplay between light and dark throughout the composition

makes clear to me or makes clear to us

how unbelievably good he was as an observer, as well, of reality.

I believe light is crucial to Dutch artists in the 17th century.

All different kinds of lakes, waterways, canals.

So those were kind of mirrors laying in the fields

who were just reflecting light all the time.

TACO: We don't know how long Vermeer took to paint a painting,

but we can reconstruct it, in a certain sense.

What we discovered in the research for this exhibition

is that he started with a relatively broad brushstroke and a sketch,

and then he starts to build it up

with very fine, nearly sometimes pointillist little dots of paint

that show the reflection of light.

And he must have spent hours observing the reflection of light

and trying to get really closer to the truth of this reflection.

So not kind of thinking about what the theories about it are

or what other artists do,

but really observing it and then putting that into paint.

And he creates such an illusion through this

that you can never see paint.

When you look at a Vermeer painting, it never becomes paint.

The illusion stays.

MAN: Vermeer lived in Delft,

and we know that in his time in the middle of the 17th century,

23,000 persons lived.

And of these 23,000, 5,000 were Catholic, so just a quarter.

So it was possible to be Catholic, but the Catholics were not allowed

to be in the administration of the city.

As a Calvinistic-born artist and young man,

he married a Catholic woman

because his wife, Catharina Bolnes, had been Catholic.

And not only she was very close to the Catholics,

but her mother-in-law, and they lived together,

Maria Thins, she was even more related to the Jesuits.

So, there was one Jesuit in her family, and they lived there.

So, it was really a very, very close neighbourhood.

PIETER: I think walking through the exhibition

really enables us to walk through his artistry.

It's not just seeing his oeuvre,

but it's understanding what he's doing

and how he's moving from one particular invention

or experiment into another.

It really enables us to get a thorough understanding

what Vermeer is as a concept.

He is an artist who is able to come up with new inventions

which other artists would have never thought about even,

but he's doing it.

GREGOR: The first room shows early works,

where he starts as a very young man

of, I would say, what is it? 22 years.

So, Christ In The House Of Mary And Martha,

this is like an altarpiece, a Catholic altarpiece.

So I think he tried to be an artist of the Grand Manner.

And this painting has a lot of features of Flemish art.

In other paintings of this early period,

he is copying an Italian painting.

He painted his Saint Praxedis.

Another painting is after a Venetian taste, the Diana.

And again, another painting, The Procuress,

it's in the style of the Utrecht Caravaggisti.

So we see different influences,

a very young artist with a lot of ambitions

and using the biggest canvases he could buy.

ROBERT LINDSAY: Preaching to the people,

Jesus Christ arrived in Bethany,

a town situated not far from Jerusalem

beyond the Mount of Olives,

where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.

Martha had a sister named Mary,

who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying.

But Martha was distracted by her many tasks,

so she came to him and asked,

"Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me

"to do all the work by myself?

"Tell her then to help me."

But the Lord answered her,

"Martha, Martha,

"you are worried and distracted by many things,

"but there is need of only one thing.

"Mary has chosen the better part,

"which will not be taken away from her."

Using a triangular composition,

this painting tells the story of opposing thought.

Martha sees a path to salvation through toil and hard work,

while Mary seeks salvation by embracing the message of God

and eternal life through the teachings of Christ.

GREGOR: We can already see in these paintings

what is interesting for him.

Women, colour, light, all these things you can see there.

But he was not able in that time or was not interested in that time

in perspective, in interiors.

Now, young artists, of course,

would love to make immediately the most important paintings.

And on top is a human being from history.

Next to the religious subjects,

history painters also used to paint mythology,

and Vermeer painted two of these mythological paintings.

We know of another one, which is lost in the 18th century.

But Diana is one of these.

It depicts a situation from the Metamorphoses of Ovidius,

where Diana, the goddess of the moon,

and at the same time, the goddess of the hunt,

and at the same time, the goddess of chastity,

is resting together with her other nymphs.

One of the nymphs is washing the feet of Diana.

She is sitting in the centre with this little half-moon on her head

so that we know this is Diana.

Vermeer is also the master of colour,

and also, in that very early work,

we see that the colours used are very, very sophisticated.

Diana is the goddess of the moon, and the moonlight is a pale yellow.

The sun is going, and the night is coming.

So I think he thought about that.

And for me, this colour scheme is coming from Venetian artists.

We don't know that Vermeer ever travelled to Italy.

The Saint Praxedis is also a religious painting

of a very old saint from the Roman times.

And the Jesuits had a special relationship

to this saint.

So there is something where he came into the new society,

and he answered with these early paintings

the demands of these forms of art.

RACHEL: But even then, you see the strangeness of Vermeer.

I mean, what biblical scene is he choosing to do?

He's choosing to do Saint Praxedis.

I mean, who the hell is she? SHE CHUCKLES

I don't think there's another Flemish picture that exists of her.

She does exist in some Italian paintings,

and she was a saint,

actually entrusted with tending the bodies of martyrs.

And so Vermeer paints her rather gorily

wringing out a sort of bloody sponge.

But, you know, what a strange choice

when you have so much... such a wide... you know,

you have a true smorgasbord of martyrs and saints to pick from.

What a peculiar choice he made.

PIETER: It's 1656, and Vermeer's 24 years old,

and he has done, as far as we know today,

just a few history paintings,

biblical scenes, mythological scenes.

And then he's opening up a new door, which leads to The Procuress.

So, it's an elderly lady standing in the background

with a younger girl in the front,

and then two figures around them, male figures.

And one of them is giving a coin to the girl,

which makes clear that we are talking about

a particular kind of love in this situation.

RACHEL: I do think that Vermeer himself was very aware and conscious

of the intricacy and importance of his symbolism,

because another of the wonderful things about this show

is there's been a lot of new research and conservation

and study of the paintings,

and a lot of changes that he made have been revealed.

And he made changes that were very, very significant.

In The Procuress there were... the coin, the gold coin.

Originally, there were more gold coins.

He took gold coins away to make just one,

one spot of gold, this tiny, glinting focal point.

Lives, reputations, loves, emotions,

all turned, gained and lost

on one tiny golden pinpoint.

A beautiful point to make. So tiny, so sharp.

PIETER: It's quite a big painting.

So the format still relates to the big history paintings

he has made before,

but he's exploiting almost a fully new kind of storytelling here.

I think the Dutch had quite a blunt kind of humour in the 17th century.

And the moral message is in it.

And this is, I believe, a very important aspect

of what Dutch art of the 17th century is about.

It's always with the finger. It's always pointing at you.

You should behave like this or not like that.

This kind of dual idea of moral humour

in a very ambitious painting, must have opened the door for him

in the way of thinking to a new kind of painting as well.

But it's also the time period in which Jan Steen settled in Delft

and had his brewery here in the centre of the town.

And if there's one artist in the 17th century

who's using his own likeness in all different kinds of roles,

for example, always looking at us,

a little bit laughing, involving us into...

well, sometimes, even the nasty aspects

of what the story is all about.

There is a kind of glimpse or echo

of that visible in the figure in the left-hand corner,

which could have been or might have been Vermeer himself,

although we are not completely secure about this.

But what we do see is that he's looking straight into our eyes

and tries to grab us

and make clear that we do not spread our attention to something else.

This is where we should focus on as a beholder.

And that's very well done.

TACO: And then suddenly, he discovers the interior,

you could say,

with a woman reading a letter in front of an open window,

which still has the sizes of painting

of those earlier religious paintings,

but the subject is completely different.

He's still very young.

He tries a new genre, a genre that's been painted before,

of what we call genre painting, of everyday scenes in an interior.

But he does something very special,

which is he introduces us as the viewer into the room,

which is still kind of with a curtain hanging there.

So we still don't know if it's actually in the room

that we're standing in, or we are outside of it,

but we're drawn into it.

And there's a woman, unaware of us as the spectator,

intently reading a letter by an open window.

Relatively few paintings show Vermeer and the subjects of Vermeer

interacting with him as the artist or with us as the public.

We're like a voyeur.

They don't know that we're there.

And he creates this tension

between the viewer and the person reading,

which makes it very lively.

Although it's very calm, you feel that any moment she can look up

while we disturb her.

And for us as a viewer, they're never imaginary,

they're real.

You really cannot see paint.

You see a room,

and it seems as if you're standing there in that room,

looking at the person, who's unaware of you looking.

WOMAN: So, we're looking into a 17th century kitchen,

and we see the milkmaid pouring milk into a bowl.

And in front of that bowl, there's a lot of bread

and also another bowl.

And she's making a bread pudding.

And for the rest, it's a very empty room.

You see this very quiet and calm painting,

but in the beginning, it had really rough brushstrokes,

and he was setting up the composition

with not a fine brush

but with really expressive brushstrokes.

So that was surprising to us.

And then the other thing is that you look at this quiet painting now,

but in the beginning, Vermeer had started it

with a big basket next to the milkmaid

and a jug rack behind her head.

So there were many things that also caught your attention,

while now it's only her.

With certain techniques,

we can definitely visualise these underlying layers,

which includes all sketch lines and changes to the composition,

which Vermeer did many.

Almost all of his paintings have these changes

so that you can really follow him

and his ideas of the perfect composition.

So for this one, it wasn't with all things in the back now.

He sort of reduced it, really, onto the milkmaid and her activity.

For The Milkmaid, it's very interesting that we see that

he was so busy with light and shadow

and the way the light comes into his compositions

that, in the tablecloth, for example,

you have, like, a white underpaint next to a black underpaint,

which you also don't see any more because he keeps on working on it.

But he was so busy with defining space and defining light

already in the underlying layers.

And then he keeps on working so that we have no idea it's there,

but it still has a big influence on us while looking at it.

If you look, for example, on the bread

that has all these little dots, actually many, many colours.

Sometimes, they're yellow and dark.

And when you zoom out, it still makes this realistic sort of bread.

So we see that he's a good observer also of light and dark

and how you have your space

almost sort of created by light and shadow.

So behind, for example, the milkmaid,

which the light comes from the left,

so her right side is lit up,

but she's standing then next to the darker part of the background.

While, on the other side,

where she is dark, the wall is much lighter.

So with that, you already get much more depth.

This is a back room where you can see the stains on the walls.

This is a view so intimate

that you can see where the milkmaid has rolled up her sleeves,

and you can see the line on her arm where the sunburn stops,

and she's pulled up her sleeves and presumably washed her hands

to do this particular sort of bit of work in the creamery.

And you can see the white flesh of her skin

where it's never seen the sun.

It's extraordinarily detailed and yet so monumental,

and he's making something so mundane so monumental.

The way he plays with the light,

the way he takes human life and treats it like a still life,

the way he takes one focus like a photographer would,

and the way he plays with the idea of outline.

You know, his extraordinary versatility with paint.

To be so versatile and yet never to show you his brushstroke.

That is really the trick of a conjurer.

This is a magician's work we're seeing.

TACO: I think the fundamental difference

between Dutch artists at the time of Vermeer

and for example, Catholic or Spanish artists

was that the Netherlands was a Protestant country.

So even though Vermeer was a Catholic,

the subjects he paints are mainly for a country that's Protestant,

where you did not make depictions of Christ,

or you also didn't make depictions of the king

because it was not only a Protestant country,

but it was also a republic.

The burghers of the country, those were the people who ruled.

And that was one of the causes

why artists started to depict everyday scenes.

And Vermeer is the master in depicting everyday scenes.

And there's no such painting as The Milkmaid,

where he makes a woman pouring out milk

into nearly a religious experience, you could say.

She's nearly the kind of... a secular Mary on the canvas.

And I think that that's really such a difference

to make the everyday important by painting it.

ROBERT LINDSAY: A young woman sits by a window

holding a lute, with confidence and an easy manner.

She appears to be tuning the lute after playing, perhaps,

the pleasure of which still remains in her gentle smile and bright eyes,

dream-like and contemplative.

The staging is simple but dramatic,

with a shaft of pale light illuminating the scene.

On the wall is a map of Europe,

but her attentions are beyond this room,

to the window, to someone passing by, perhaps.

The rough sketch of a viola da gamba

and the flow of song books across the table and on the floor

might suggest the prospect of a duet,

whereas the dark chair opposite implies an absence.

A prospective visitor,

or someone who has just departed?

The scene is tinged with excitement.

The young woman dresses elegantly in yellow with ermine trim.

The fabric neatly drapes around her young shoulders,

her fine neck articulated with a line of small pearls.

This is in contrast to a large glass earring,

its precious nature defined by a single dot of white paint.

Here, life is fleeting, like the transitory nature of music.

There is a union of senses.

Everything is balanced by a diffused moment of private contemplation.

There's no other country in Europe

where paintings are sold in the numbers

as is happening in the Netherlands.

And what we see is it's the burghers,

so it's the middle-class, collecting paintings.

And so when you look into an inventory

of an average family in Delft, for example, in the 17th century,

you can find descriptions of dozens of paintings already.

There must have been a conversation

between Vermeer as an artist and his audience.

So he must have been very well aware

of his audience for whom he painted.

I think one of the aspects that's crucial

is that there appears to be

a couple of collectors that help him...

to start flying as an artist.

And it's Pieter van Ruijven, who was a wealthy man,

together with Maria de Knuijt

and in the past, we always tended to focus on him.

But we now know that Maria was a neighbour.

I mean, she was living in the same street as Vermeer as well.

She must have known him as a young kid already.

And they started to give them money

at crucial moments in their early life as a youngly wed couple.

But soon afterwards they must have started to buy the first paintings,

and he was really lucky to have a couple like them around.

RACHEL: Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid

is a peculiarly interesting and intriguing painting to me

because I think in this particular painting

when Vermeer is actually saying,

this is the reason that you should look at paintings,

and this is the reason that a painting

that looks a little bit quiet and a little bit boring

and could easily be passed over is actually riveting.

You get this snapshot moment,

but it's never stilled at the moment of drama

when people are sort of going, "argh," or making some great scene.

It's the little sort of interstitial moment in life,

the little bit that actually will never get onto the movie poster.

No-one's going to choose that.

Why is the woman writing this letter?

She appears to have opened a letter already.

It looks to me as if it's probably a letter

that she had already written herself,

because the sealing wax that she had used to seal it

is still there, it's lying on the floor beside it.

And yet she's crumpled it up and thrown it on the floor

and she's started writing again.

She's re-thought her idea about why she's going to write,

and she's writing it with a fierce determination.

She's locked into her idea. She's looking down.

The maid is actually quite bored and she's looking out of the window.

She's smiling at something.

Possibly there's a manservant who she's in love with,

there's someone passing outside that window.

As always with Vermeer, we're not allowed to see outside the window.

So, already he's saying, I'm showing you a world within a world.

And I've drawn the curtain aside

from this extraordinary theatrical stage set I've created.

So, already he's playing with our layers of perception like that.

And then behind is another picture, which is The Finding of Moses.

The idea of an orphaned boy lost by his real mother,

found by a pharaoh's daughter.

We know that the woman writing the letter in Vermeer is rich.

There's a coat of arms on her window. She's beautifully dressed.

She has a maid servant who she can afford to keep standing around.

She's got a beautiful house.

This is a very rich vein of storytelling

and a very intriguing vein of storytelling.

Does this cast a light on the whole world that Vermeer is showing?

He's showing us exactly why

a quiet moment can be one of the most intriguing moments.

He's showing us the potential of so many stories,

so much intrigue.

He's showing us how something very sort of colloquial,

if you like, can be utterly captivating.

GREGOR: Letters are the best manner to show how the world outside

is present in a painting.

Reading a letter means that you formulate as you speak

the written words in your mind.

So he loves to paint windows

and he loves also to paint sometimes women looking out of the window

so that there also the outside and the inside is coming together.

So, it is a little bit about introversion and extroversion

and it is about the inner and the outer world.

And he plays with that.

PIETER: Time is crucial to Vermeer in different ways.

When you look at the paintings,

it's that one and only moment he is grabbing.

These are particular moments fixed in time.

There is a before and there is an after.

They can last for a longer time,

but he really knows to grab time in these paintings.

And that's an unbelievable quality as an artist.

There is a lightness to the conversation in this scene.

A young woman leans in, to engage with her imposing visitor,

an officer in a red uniform with a big black hat.

The room looks familiar to them and a private place to meet.

They share a glass of wine and the young woman seems charmed

by what is being said by the swashbuckling officer,

who cocks a confident arm on his hip.

We only see a glimpse of his furtive face

as he sits upright and speaks directly to the young woman.

A dark silhouette in a day-lit space.

Her hand is gently open with acceptance or perhaps amusement?

Is this courtship or just banter between occasional friends?

There is a rare glimpse of the outside world

reflected in the open window

and the beautifully rendered map on the wall

evokes the great age of Dutch exploration and commerce

in Holland and West Friesland.

Its accuracy is realistic and much admired.

But there is ambiguity in this work.

The reality of the scene confuses us,

because it implies a knowable truth,

which Vermeer never confirms or denies.

He allows a void to form in our imagination,

building an intriguing, but incomplete story,

and then he invites us in.

To create an image that's an illusion,

that gives the feeling that you as a viewer are there,

actually looking at somebody doing something,

you have to create a little story.

Because the problem with painting is that it's not moving.

It's not a film. So, you can only create the story

to create a moment before and then create a moment after.

I wouldn't describe Vermeer as virtuoso.

I would describe him more as obsessed with light.

And that's what makes him special.

It is really this digging into what is light?

How can I make the illusion of light?

How does an object reflect?

And I think that that's one of the reasons

why it took him so much time to paint each painting.

Because first he analyses the individual props,

the individual objects,

and he moulds them in a way

that he thinks that the light is reflected

in the best way possible.

And then he has to connect them to each other,

because otherwise you would have a painting

which would have, like, loose ingredients floating around.

But he connects them then through light, again,

and that makes them into an image that never becomes paint.

The paint has dissolved and you stand there in that room.

The Lacemaker is, for me, one of the most beautiful paintings.

This painting is extraordinary, but why is it beautiful?

One thing is that Vermeer is coming close to a woman,

so close as you normally wouldn't do.

So, I think it's only less than a metre

and he is observing what she's doing.

So, you are really close to her

and the hands of her

hold the little, little threads of her work, of the lace.

And these threads are painted absolutely sharp, totally sharp.

So, our view is focused on these little threads there.

So other artists in his time depicting this scene,

paint my finger here sharp and also this hand sharp.

But he doesn't.

So, in the foreground of this painting,

the other threads you see, they're absolutely blurred.

And a lot of dots of the colour.

So, what he is doing is he has one focus

and he accepts that is what we see and notice,

and not just always change to the next focus.

So, it's a little wonder of optics, what you can see there.

And this underlines and strengthens, of course,

this effect that you are so close to her.

Now, how could he learn that?

How could he see it? It is really amazing.

If you were an artist in the Netherlands

at the time of Vermeer,

there was a lot of research being done in science, on lenses,

and Vermeer, obsessed with observing,

must have known of the camera obscura

and must have also used it to analyse what we actually see

and how you can translate it to the picture plane.

But a camera obscura, as the word says, it's a dark room,

so you can't really paint in it, because it's dark what you see.

But you do get an image which is in front of you, a real image,

through either a very small hole or a lens

or two lenses onto a surface.

So, there he could have observed

that what is in focus is very well defined

and that the surroundings of that are more blurred.

He was close to the Jesuits,

and the Jesuits did a lot of research on optics and on light

as they saw that as the light of God.

Vermeer draws us further and further

in the course of this show into the interior world.

And I don't just mean the interior world of the room,

the room which doesn't have window views outwards.

He holds us in, in a way, in a miniature world,

the domestic world.

But, by doing that, and precisely by doing that,

he opens the world outwards

because he opens up the whole emotional world

of these people that he's painting.

So, he takes us deep into their minds,

these women who sit so still and, in a way, so trapped.

And yet Vermeer sees, "No, she has a rich life."

She has a life that he is going to show us

exactly what she's capable of.

But also, even more subtly, there's a third interior world

that he opens up, and that is our world

because, in a way, by closing off that entire outer world,

he opens that inner world and makes it contiguous with our world.

We are kept out of it by the wall of a curtain or a chair

or whatever he puts in the foreground,

he makes us, and he places us,

very, very concretely there as a spectator.

And, therefore, just as the curtain is drawn aside

as to this little scene that we stand witness to,

the curtains to our own minds are drawn aside

and we, and all that we bring to it within our own heads,

becomes a part of this space he shows.

It's a very, very peculiar way that he has of working

and a very rare way he has of working.

Because where so many painters draw us in

and set us almost like actors in the scene,

"You too are a player in this histrionic drama,"

instead of histrionics, we get hermetics.

We get a very closed thing

that asks us you too are a part of a drama,

which is perhaps a spiritual drama and an emotional drama,

but it's your interior world that is being drawn in.

I think the Girl with a Pearl Earring is so loved

because of the simplicity of its beauty.

She looks at us in her highly charged way

and yet it's so simple, in a moment of time, of happiness.

You can't kind of deconstruct it.

He paints light and he captures light on her skin,

on her lips, on the pearl, in every detail,

in such a way that it really simmers.

And the dark background, which originally was a dark green hanging,

which might have distracted a bit more than it does now,

but still, that only helps enhancing

the directness of her face.

And he must have used a model, but it is idealised.

He can't have painted this from his memory,

even though he was a fantastic painter.

The detail in observation is so big

and the way he observes the reflection of light

on the smallest patch of skin,

on her ear lobe, everywhere,

that must have been done through observation of a model.

But then you make it more beautiful.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring is what we call a Tronie,

which is an imaginative figure, an imaginative head.

And obviously you wouldn't see people in the street

wearing this headdress.

But you also, the other way around,

can't think of this painting of a woman with a 17th century dress,

because that would take your attention

off her face and off the pearl.

I think that the relation between the colours,

so between the ochre, the blue, the pink of the face,

is necessary to create this very focused image.

And that's where the mastery of Vermeer lies.

He takes components and he composes them in such a way

that you actually are focused to watch the thing

he wants you to look at.

And that's not only her eyes,

it's not even that much the pearl earring,

but it's the lips, and the mouth that's slightly opened

and you wouldn't have had a portrait like that.

because that was just not done.

It was outside the etiquette of that time.

We see eyebrows. She hasn't really got eyebrows.

So, where other painters know there are eyebrows,

so they paint a line, because that's what eyebrows are,

Vermeer only indicates it through tones of light.

And, therefore, we see eyebrows.

With the nose, it's not really delineated.

We see a nose,

but it's just a reflection of light in a blotch of paint.

We've often thought that the figures in the paintings

are not family members

and that it's all a kind of 19th century romantic idea.

But, in the end, when you think about it,

Vermeer must have used models,

and then it's very likely to take a family member

or a neighbour or somebody who's in your vicinity as a model.

So, it could very well be that this was one of his daughters

or his wife.

But it's for us, as a viewer,

not the intention that we see a family member,

so we'll never really know.

What Vermeer is doing with his paintings,

and especially these paintings

in which we see people playing music,

for example, or where musical instruments are laying on the floor,

it's almost as if they're reacting on more senses.

It's not only looking,

but it's also hearing, which we see,

and sometimes even smelling.

I mean, he really tries to create something

that applies to different senses.

And one of the things I always ask when I'm in front of a painting

which is, again, about someone playing music,

is did he play the harpsichord himself, for example?

Or did he sing or whistle when he was painting?

Was it about the pleasure of painting

and what happened to the man when he created this?

When you look at these paintings

and think about them and how he created them,

it's also about the pleasure of painting.

And I very much believe that pleasure for him

as someone who created

just two or three paintings a year on average was crucial.

The Lady Writing is exceptional in the work of Vermeer,

like The Girl with a Pearl.

She's one of the few that actually looks at us, the viewer.

But that's also the story,

because you know that a second ago

she was writing undisturbed.

And then when you look at her, she's kind of distracted

and she looks up at you, the viewer.

So, there he creates his little story

where we can imagine a moment before

the amazement, oh, is that you, the viewer?

And then afterwards, when we walk on,

she will go back to writing again.

And that gives this movement that's dynamic.

Yet at the same moment, it's a very calm moment,

because she's sitting there writing.

Although he is a superlative master,

he is superlatively skilled,

you cannot see a brushstroke.

How does he do that?

Look at the painting and you will see.

Sometimes you try and focus on something.

You think, if I leant closer, I would definitely see that.

But no, you wouldn't, because he's held you

in the distance from it.

These are paintings that work

on the most skilled visual level that there is,

the most technically masterful level there is,

and that is why you have to see them in real life.

And when you see them in real life like that,

you realise why they have attained that iconic status,

which is why they were given the charisma,

which is why they were fed to you in every art history book,

which is why you're rushing to see them in this show.

This picture portrays a moment of theatrical drama.

The usual constructs of a room are stripped away.

The mistress and maid are softly lit

and seem to have emerged from the darkness beyond.

We sense the scene has paused at a moment of tension.

The maid's dutiful delivery of a letter

and the mistress' thoughtful anticipation

of what its contents might be.

Are we to presume this is a love letter sent, or an unexpected reply?

The mistress wears an exquisite fur-trimmed jacket

and her golden hair has been styled and adorned

with a snaking band of bright pearls.

A large earring hangs effortlessly,

rendered in white, with a milky glow.

The maid, by contrast,

is in plain working clothes,

but displays an element of complicit knowingness

in her polite expression.

The setting of the mistress and maid

in an upper-class domestic scene was enormously popular as a subject.

Vermeer returns to the theme several times.

It offered an opportunity to reflect on social structures

and the role of fashion as an indicator of status and wealth.

The striking yellow jacket worn by the mistress

makes an appearance in five of Vermeer's paintings.

Maybe the model is the same person,

or maybe Vermeer was simply attracted to its dynamic colour?

Or maybe both?

Nevertheless, this was a distinct and popular prop,

that radiated luxury in a spectacular and theatrical way.

Vermeer realises that colour is not colour.

Colour is light

and it's a reflection of light and how we perceive a colour.

And he does that in such a masterful way

that when we look at the paintings,

we don't really see colour, we see light.

And I think that that's something that's different from other artists

and the way he builds up this reflection,

the shimmering of the reflection,

by sometimes using little dots,

sometimes being very precise in what he paints

and what's in focus.

And that's something,

that it's a use of colour that nobody before him did.

And that's why I think he's rightly called the master of light

and not the master of colour.

When we look at Vermeer paintings...

..we always get immediately the feeling

there's a kind of spotlight outside.

So, he's using one window,

mostly at the left-hand side of his compositions,

where light enters the space, enters the room,

and he uses that throughout his career in different ways.

And then he's almost, well, moving the camera into the room

from that moment onwards

and focusing all the time on what is happening in the interior.

But the light is still there and the windows are still there.

Sometimes we see the windows as a kind of physical element.

In other paintings we see the light

and how the light is very close to that actual window,

which is not within the context of the painting he created.

But he knows how he can convince us as a beholder

that the light source is very close

to the scene he's actually depicting.

RACHEL: I think one of the things we always have to remember

is these were all paintings that were made to be lived with.

They were made for places and for rooms and for lives.

And people studied them far, far more carefully.

People studied their worlds.

So, the world inside your house

was the world that you saw to a huge amount.

These were the television sets of their era.

This is how they saw everything.

The people who saw these paintings

would have unteased an awful lot of the symbolism

and the morality and the theology and the philosophy that lay in them.

They would have also hugely appreciated

and loved the sheer facility and skill of them.

I think these pictures were very, very appreciated in their era

in a way that we sometimes forget.

I'm standing here in front of Woman Reading a Letter in Blue

and this painting is so special to me,

because this painting has such a subtle tonality.

We see a young woman and in front of her there's a table

and there's a small chest

and in there she keeps her most valuable possessions,

so her pearls, but also her letters,

and she is reading one of these letters

and you see her really focused on the letter she's reading.

This is a very intimate image we're looking at.

So, several years ago, I was able to treat this painting

and there was a full conservation treatment,

which entailed taking off the old yellow varnish layers

and there were several old repairs

that were quite disturbing when you looked at the painting.

To me, it was a very special project.

I got to spend so much time behind this painting

and found even new things that,

I thought I knew this painting pretty well,

but, even then, we found new things and one of those

is the way this beautiful contour of the jacket was painted.

I think it's my favourite part of the painting.

If you look at the contour, it's almost glowing.

So he painted the blue jacket,

then painted a light blue layer for the wall

and then he came with the top layer of the wall,

continuing with leaving a small line of this underlay

visible along the contour,

which gives you a very atmospheric effect

and, with our new research,

it became clear that it was even more complex than that,

that he put on top of the jacket

another layer of expensive ultramarine

and continuing a little bit over this light blue underlayer.

So, this overlapping of colours leaving underlayers open,

it's very unique to Vermeer.

While looking at other 17th-century painters,

it's often easier to understand the way it was painted,

but with Vermeer, it's every time a big question.

There's something magical about it.

A finely dressed young lady drinks a glass of wine.

Her face is framed by a clean, white hat

and her arm is folded across her body

as if to steady herself for the last few sips.

Her dashing suitor in a black hat and olive mantle,

stands impatiently

with an eager hand on the wine bottle, anticipating a refill.

A stringed instrument, the cittern, balances on a Spanish chair

and musical notebooks lay open on the table.

A serenade perhaps,

but is this a scene of courtship or a cautionary tale?

The play of light infers the middle of the day.

Maybe a little too early for drinking wine.

When he shows us the man coming in and feeding wine to the girl,

I don't know why, I get a sense that he's critical of the man.

I don't get a sense that he's there saying,

you know, he's there clapping his hands, and saying, "Good on you."

You know, "Get a leg over."

I really feel that's a critical thing.

I feel it's almost a moral allegory.

Don't do that. Don't let it happen.

I think he's showing us she thinks she's in control, but she's not.

GREGOR: If you make the difference

between the virtuous and the less virtuous women,

then, of course, also the less virtuous depictions of society

were very attractive always, not only in the work of Vermeer.

A strong idea that you show something negative

and, at the same time, if you recognise it, to do the opposite.

The question why he paints such a lot of women

should be answered only by Vermeer.

I think I would love to ask it.

He had eight daughters and three sons.

I think, of course, women were more attractive for every collector.

But other artists like Ter Borch

who are making the same subjects

always show that also men are entering the rooms,

are together with the women and so on.

Depicting women is also a sales factor. But we don't know.

Part of the appeal of the paintings

might be that they are about us.

So, what we see happening in these paintings

is still about everyday activities we still do today as well.

If it's pouring milk into a bowl, reading a letter,

looking outside the window, for example,

it's very tiny, little activities.

The Geographer is one of the only five paintings

we know by Vermeer that's dated.

So the entire chronology of Vermeer's work

we set around these very few paintings,

of which we have the date.

What The Geographer and its pendant,

because it was painted with another painting, The Astronomer.

What it tells us is that in 17th-century houses,

the outside world was brought inside.

And also Vermeer's interest in mathematics,

which he must have had,

if you look at his interest in optics and in perspective

because The Astronomer and The Geographer,

those two subjects, astronomy and geography,

were part of the lessons you would get to learn math.

Globes, for example, you always see,

you see one in the background,

you see a globe of the skies, of heaven,

and you see a globe of the world.

So, it was really by those objects,

and there's a map hanging in the painting,

there's tools that a geographer uses,

with these objects he brings the world, the outside world, in.

But he also shows

the incredible expansion of the Dutch empire around the world.

I wouldn't be surprised if these two paintings were commissioned,

commissioned by somebody who was really interested in these subjects.

Because they're one of the very few paintings by Vermeer

that only depict a man.

And they're very specific subjects.

So, they wouldn't have been to everybody's liking.

He's depicting an allegory of Catholic faith.

The Catholic faith you have to do with the woman in blue and white,

because it's the sky and heaven depicted with these colours.

There must be a stone, which means a cornerstone, which is Christ.

And this cornerstone has to destroy the serpent of the devil,

which you can see on the painting.

The woman, the personification of faith in the centre,

has to overcome the worldly, the earthly things or the vices.

She's standing on the Earth, the globe.

But Vermeer added one important thing.

This woman is now looking toward the ceiling of the room

where you have a glass orb hanging,

and on this glass orb you see a lot of light reflections.

And this is a Jesuit symbol

and it means in Latin, Capit Quod Non Capit,

"It grasps more than it can grasp."

Faith is always something

which is directed to something greater than yourself.

So, this orb is reflecting the whole universe, if you want.

Here is an allegory about faith.

Where virtuous choices need to be made,

and a delicate balance has to be struck

between earthly desire and heavenly devotion.

A woman dressed in a blue jacket with fur trim

stands serenely at a sturdy table in the corner of a room.

The delicate scales in her right hand are level,

suggesting a pensive moment of reflection.

The table is partially covered by a large blue cloth

and a clutter of boxes,

jewellery, pearls and gold.

Light enters from a high window and softly illuminates the woman,

framed by a painting on the wall

depicting a scene from The Last Judgement.

All focus centres around the balance.

A perfect equilibrium.

To weigh and to judge are parallel themes

in the writings of the Jesuit Saint Ignatius of Loyola,

who states that the faithful must examine their conscience

when weighing their sins before judgement.

Earthly pleasures such as gold and vice

must be balanced against virtue and devotion to God,

to conduct our lives with temperance and moderation.

The return to religious subjects completes a circle for Vermeer

and seems to suggest a period of self-reflection.

RACHEL: The Jesuits were a very strong influence on Vermeer.

We know that.

And you have to remember that a very powerful part

of the Jesuitical tradition

was this idea of one faith in everyday life,

but also a profound part of what they taught

was an Ignatian idea of something called imaginative contemplation.

And you placed yourself there and you imagined yourself there.

You know, Ignatius was preaching

that you imagined yourself there with all your senses,

and that was part of your prayerful life,

was that with all your senses you placed yourself inside that scene,

imagined yourself as part of it.

And through that drew your moral and spiritual guide to it.

Find one picture to stand in front of and engage with,

and engage you with all five senses.

You know, you can taste the tartness of the wine.

You can feel every texture.

You hear the sound of everything in that room. You can hear it.

This deep religious connotation is something that he imbibes so deeply

that he is giving us.

This is a deeply religious world,

but embedded in a very ordinary domain,

a very ordinary realm.

TACO: Vermeer married into a very rich family,

so there was money around.

But when he died in 1675, in the cold December month,

he was actually very short of money.

His wife tells that he dies frenetic,

because he's so worried about

the financial situation of the family.

A lot of families in the Netherlands went through this

because, after 1672,

when the Dutch were basically at war with every country in Europe,

the economy collapsed.

And Vermeer suffered from that,

because he couldn't sell his paintings any more,

because the market had collapsed.

PIETER: When you think about him as a person, as a human being,

time ran out.

I mean, as a father of a huge family of young children,

the youngest was one and a half when he died.

When you think about his wife, who was 44,

when she... she was a widow and, all of a sudden,

she was confronted with all of these debts she didn't know about.

So, time was crucial, not only in the paintings by Vermeer

but also in what he is

as a human being in the 17th century, I believe.

Vermeer is the most unformulaic painter.

He knew that paint was a material,

a three-dimensional, malleable, living material.

I mean, this is alchemy.

Look at the speck of light on the earring

of the Girl with a Pearl Earring,

maybe one of the most famous and looked at specks of light,

or most notable specks of light,

in the entirety of the art historical canon.

You can't even see that it's been done with a brushstroke.

It just sort of emerges by magic.

That's the magic of Vermeer.

TACO: Vermeer makes us realise what it is to be human.

The simplicity of his paintings, the intimacy,

the focus, brings us back to humans,

to human beings in acting with each other,

in our solitary moments, in a room, in a space.

And I think it's that human skill,

which is so often lost, that Vermeer embodies.

He was an artist who created from his imagination,

very carefully, these scenes that make the clock stop ticking.

And that still fascinates us today.

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