Vermeer’s Women

Recently, I have been doing quite a lot of reading and thinking about Michael Fried’s concept of ‘absorptivity.’ Although he focuses on French genre painting of the 1750s onwards, especially Chardin’s, his analysis of such paintings as portraying a new absorption in the self, in the everyday task, oblivious of the viewer, which is yet still orientated as a kind of performance, seemed obviously relevant to me at the Fitzwilliam Museum’s current show, Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence.

It’s contentious whether the title is accurate. For ‘Vermeer’s Women,’ only a handful of the works are by Johannes Vermeer. But, the curators have certainly succeeded in creating the feeling of Vermeer in the exhibition. The muted wall colour, soft lighting, and secluded corners all help to create the calm, translucent atmosphere of a Vermeer. In such context, it’s just a shame that the show is so popular and therefore rather crowded!

The exhibition is nonetheless compelling. Themed around ‘invitation,’ ‘threshold,’ and ‘sanctum,’ it considers the domestic female spaces so beloved of Vermeer and his contemporaries, and the glimpses of lifestyles and attitudes which these reveal. The works they have marshalled are alluringly beautiful, epitomized by Samuel van Hoogstraten’s View of an Interior, in which soft light draws the eye through an open door towards a portrait of a woman reading a letter, turned away from the viewer, secret and silent.