Vermeer as Scientist

Claudia Swan | Times Literary Supplement | 6th January 2016

Vermeer’s paintings have a timeless appeal but we know little about what he wanted his works to say. “A student once described his encounter with the “Girl with a Pearl Earring” as tantamount to meeting the love of his life and forgetting to ask her name. [This painting] is an appropriate emblem for Vermeer’s work as a whole: what we know, and what we think is familiar, is forever vexed by its remaining unknowable and inaccessible.”