Vermeer’s View of Delft

HIGH ART OF THE LOW COUNTRIES| 12 September 2014

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140912-worlds-most-beautiful-painting

The dramatic boom and bust of The Golden Age

The Netherlands experienced a harsh rise and fall in fortune in the 17th Century – echoed in the lives of its great painters, says Andrew Graham-Dixon.

For a period of barely 100 years, The Netherlands boasted the most powerful empire in the world – a power driven by markets rather than privilege.

And one of its successful areas was its art market: the great painters Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer contributed to a cultural explosion known as The Golden Age.

And like the tiny country they lived and worked in, these painters experienced good fortune as well as bad – enjoying prestige, wealth and prosperity before falling into poverty.

Vermeer’s fortunes in particular were tied to those of the Republic: 1672, when the artist turned 40, was its ‘year of disaster’, as English, French and German forces tried to invade from different directions. The Dutch survived – but their global supremacy did not, and Vermeer also fell upon hard times before dying soon after.

For Andrew Graham-Dixon, it is one of Vermeer’s paintings that stands as the ultimate elegy to Holland in The Golden Age. His View of Delft encapsulates both the dream of a perfect world and its vulnerability – and was described by the French writer Proust as “the most beautiful painting in the world”.

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