Vermeer Bibilography

There is an interesting new biography now available on Vermeer and well-reviewed in the April 16, 2001 New Yorker.

Vermeer : A View of Delft
by Anthony Bailey
List Price: $27.50
Hardcover - 256 pages 1 Ed edition (April 2001)
Henry Holt & Company, Inc.; ISBN: 0805067183

A review from Booklist:
Bailey, a prolific, polished, and avid writer, last portrayed the landscape painter J. M. W. Turner and now fleshes out the life story of one of the most revered and elusive painters of all time, Vermeer, the artist-poet of light, serenity, the interior life, and womankind. A nimble and entertaining writer, Bailey makes up for a paucity of documentation of Vermeer's life and temperament by presenting an energetically detailed depiction of the painter's world, both the city of Delft and his chaotic household, musing on the mystery of how Vermeer achieved the quiet, even holy, perfection of his paintings with 11 young children underfoot. Bailey muses on Protestant Vermeer's marriage to a well-off Catholic and theorizes that he took over his father's art dealership, used a camera obscura, and knew the pioneering naturalist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. Dead at 43 with 35 masterpieces ensuring his immortality, Vermeer's influence on art, literature, and even war (see Bailey's lively account of how the heroic forger, Anthonius van Meegeren, fooled Goring with a fake Vermeer and rescued 200 looted paintings) has been cosmic. Donna Seaman, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A review from Library Journal:
Fluent essayist and New Yorker contributor Bailey gives a personalized overview of Johannes Vermeer, reading from the paintings to the man, and vice versa. Much of Bailey's factual underpinnings comes from the work of John Montias (Vermeer and His Milieu, 1989. o.p., and Artists and Artisans of Delft, 1982. o.p.), but he has a penetrating eye himself, and Vermeer, of whom so much is unknown, is a topic of perpetual interest. Organized around individual paintings.