Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

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Summary: Vermeer and His Peers
Review: Is there anything new to say about the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer? Scholars have been obsessed with his paintings for years. To my delight, this book by Bryan Jay Wolf actually offers fresh insight into the issues that preoccupied the artist--and well as other Dutch painters in the seventeenth century. Issues of commerce, domesticity, private space, gender--and new innovations in technique, some of the most important in the entire history of painting.

The book is wonderfully illustrated, not just with images by Vermeer, but also by de Hooch, Metsu, Luiken, Netscher, Ter Borch, Rubens, Dou, van Hoogstraten, and Steen--and closer to our own time, paintings by Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, even Charles Addams--as Wolf explains the lasting impact of this strange and elusive artist. A must for anyone interested in Vermeer or in the social history of Dutch art.