A View Of Delft - Softcover

Bailey, Anthony

3.85

305 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712664726 ISBN 13: 9780712664721

Publisher: Pimlico, 2002

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Vermeer has always been considered the most elusive of great artists, but this book tracks him down in his home town. It takes the reader back to seventeenth-century Delft, in a piece of historical writing that does justice to its now timeless subject. Anthony Bailey makes use of the scholarly research that has accumulated in the last century, as well as recent findings, and then reaches beyond these facts to expose the hidden Vermeer. The result is a vivid, convincing portrait of the Protestant innkeeper's son who married a prosperous Catholic girl and had 15 children of whom 11 survived. Vermeer died relatively young and left fewer than 40 pictures. Many of these pictures are indeed masterpieces, and Anthony Bailey examines the scientific expertise which lies behind their calm mystery. He introduces us to Vermeer's colleagues and fellow-citizens, and charts his celebrity as it slowly spread out of Holland and encompassed the world. He examines Vermeer's effect on many creative and destructive people, including Proust and Hitler. A View of Delft is a highly original attempt to get at Vermeer's life and personality, by setting him imaginatively in the context of Delft, its culture and history.

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Review:

Johannes Vermeer's reputation as one of the greatest of the Old Masters has never been higher, and in A View from Delft Anthony Bailey offers an elegant and concise historical biography of "the sphinx of Delft", that locates his genius firmly within the world of 17th-century Delft. Bailey begins from the lack of hard facts about Vermeer's life. He is "a ghost lacking material attributes", but through painstaking research and careful detective work, Bailey pieces together Vermeer's life, which he combines with deft and sensitive interpretations of all the great paintings. From Vermeer's humble beginnings as an innkeeper's son, Bailey traces Vermeer's marriage to a wealthy Catholic, his immersion in the political, commercial and scientific world of Delft, and his growing assurance as a painter. Vermeer emerges as a calm perfectionist, "a man who changed details, added and deleted things, who left a canvas on an easel and went away for a while and allowed it to germinate, coming back with new thoughts and a renewed desire to achieve perfection". Bailey also takes the reader beyond Vermeer's death, to his growing reputation over the 20th century, and the involvement of many of his greatest works in bizarre acts of theft and forgery. A View of Delft is a delightful little book, that often feels like a Vermeer painting itself; calm, assured, and in possession of all the relevant facts. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"A delightful compilation of oblique reflections and partial views, bringing Vermeer to life through the place and the time in which he worked" (The Times)

"Engaging and highly readable" (Daily Telegraph)

"Bailey carries us back into the daily life and atmosphere of seventeenth-century Delft" (Economist)

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