An Art of Women

In paintings made between 1657 and 1663, elaborating on Fabritius’s optical innovations and compositions by his peers, Vermeer gradually invented and perfected the modern Delft interior: an empirically observed light-filled room rendered in convincing perspective, based on rooms in his house (Plates 5-10). He also developed a new psychological depth of his figures based on his wife and other models, who embodied the everyday world of subjective experience that constitutes the foundation of genre painting, and specifically interiority as thinking beings. Vermeer was primarily responding to Rembrandt’s autobiographical turn, particularly his use of his female partners as models, and both artists can be situated within a broader trajectory of representations of sex and love in Western art. Whereas Michelangelo was said to have dismissed Northern painting as “women’s art,” Vermeer offered an “art of women.”