Mariet Westermann

Considering how much I fell in love with Vermeer's work when I visited the Rijksmuseum back in 2010, I really should like this collection more than I do. Sadly, it is at best an art historian's description of the works Vermeer produced throughout his career and the influences they had on Dutch art. The book is short, contains a brief Table of Contents to tell where each section talking about different aspects of these pieces is, and a small acknowledgments page at the end. I suppose if I had to introduce a US high school class to Vermeer and his art, this would not be a bad way to do it, but you do not get very much out of this book that you would not get from a web tour of the museum.
The book was published by Rijksmuseum, where much of his art is kept. Thus, it reads like a visual guide to the museum tour. The text portions are immensely flowery descriptions of the work and the works themselves are presented in the order that you can see them at the museum. As such, I would very much like to go and meet my 20 year old self who wanted to know more about Vermeer after falling in love with his art and chastise him for not checking that there would be something entirely new in the text you spent roughly $20 on.
Stylistically, the book best represents the sections of an art history thesis discussing Vermeer's work. It starts with a basic description of the works in question, launches into the significance of the paintings with brief understandings of the history surrounding Vermeer at the time, and finishes in the most thematically self-satisfied way by explaining how important these works were for the future. Maybe it is my history background, but explaining how important you are to history is something that she discussed briefly at the end and not cover most of the final third of the book. Next time, I will buy a Taschen product regarding Vermeer since that should increase the odds of giving me historical context and artistic perspectives. This book is strictly for people who have never been to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and even then you could probably get the same result from a PBS episode.… (mer)