Vermeer’s Vanishing Act

One of the many clever strokes in Andrew O’Hagan’s 2024 novel Caledonian Road was casting his floundering, public intellectual hero as the author of a best-selling biography of Johannes Vermeer. Given the paucity of facts about Vermeer’s life and the thoroughness with which that paucity has been picked over, knowledgeable readers may have sniffed, but the joke is on the sniffers, since the fictional biography is pointedly a book about an absent subject—an outline around essential emptiness. (Needless to say, there’s a metaphor there.)The biography’s success nets its author lucrative gigs with fashion houses, which should be preposterous, but the current state of real-world Vermeer fandom makes it believable. Three years after the Rijksmuseum exhibition broke the box office (not a metaphor—the ticketing system collapsed under the demand), you can buy skateboards blazoned with Girl with a Pearl Earring, bathe with rubber ducks sporting her turban, or (like a woman I recently saw sketching at Tate Britain) have her face tattooed on your bicep. At the more cerebral end of the market, recent months have seen the publication of Closer to Vermeer, a Rijksmuseum compendium of serious resea...