Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest Dutch painters and for some the single greatest painter of all, lived a quiet life and produced a remarkably small corpus of work. In Vermeer’s Family Secrets, Benjamin Binstock revolutionizes how we think about Vermeer’s work and life. Vermeer is famously a mystery in art: there is scant information on his life and training, and nothing to connect him to any students. What remains is the paintings themselves as well as some historical information and surmise.
Lavishly illustrated with more than 130 black and white images and more than 90 color plates, the book also includes a remarkable color gatefold spread that presents the entirety of Vermeer’s oeuvre arranged in chronological order in 1/20 scale, demonstrating the relative size of the paintings over the artist’s career. No book on Vermeer has ever done this comparison of scale, nor has any book presented for visual comparison the complete output in this fashion.
Like Poe’s purloined letter, Vermeer’s secrets are sometimes out in the open where everyone can see them. Benjamin Binstock shows us where to look. Piecing together evidence, the tools of art history, and his own intuitive skills, he gives us for the first time a history of Vermeer’s work in light of Vermeer’s life. On almost every page of Vermeer’s Family Secrets, there is a perception or an adjustment that rethinks what we know about Vermeer and his oeuvre.
Perhaps the most arresting revelation of Vermeer’s Family Secrets is the final one: stumped by inconsistencies in technique, materials, and artistic level, Binstock posits that several of the late paintings—ones accepted as canonical works by Vermeer—are in fact not by Vermeer at all but by his eldest daughter, Maria. How he argues this is one of the book’s many pleasures.
