The blockbuster art exhibit of the year, the show that Bostonians are going to want to see above all others, is virtually a stone’s throw away. “Vermeer and the Delft School” will be at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 27 before it travels to the National Gallery in London (it may be cheaper to fly to London, but you can’t drive there).

The reason for the excitement is a rare gathering of some 15 Vermeers. Five Christmases ago, at the National Gallery in Washington, there was an even more remarkable Vermeer show — the first exhibit ever devoted exclusively to his work, with 21 of his approximately 34 known paintings from 13 collections around the world.

This Delft exhibit is larger (159 objects) and more didactic in nature. The show provides a complex context for Jan Vermeer’s mysterious and mysteriously small output. There are important paintings by his major Delft colleagues (Carel Fabritius — Vermeer’s link to Rembrandt — and Pieter de Hooch) and a vast variety of genre paintings (church interiors, flower arrangements, landscapes, portraits, paintings with religious and mythological subjects, an anatomy lesson, paintings of the city after the devastating gunpowder-magazine explosion of 1654), drawings, maps, and even some sketchbooks by artists we’ve largely forgotten. There are also tapestries, tiles, silver platters and wine ewers, drinking glasses, musical instruments — all of which appear in paintings of that time, including Vermeer’s. The catalogue, by Met curator Walter Liedtke, runs 626 pages.

Vermeer is surely more popular than ever. Last year, two well-researched and intriguing novels were published about him: Susan Vreeland’s The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (a collection of interlinked short stories in reverse chronological order, beginning after World War II and going back in time to Vermeer himself in Delft) and Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (a plausible fictional guess about the origin of one of Vermeer’s best-loved images).

One thing the show tells us is that there’s more to Vermeer than small canvases of intimate domestic scenes. In 1995, his most artistically and intellectually ambitious canvas, The Art of Painting, was too fragile to travel from Vienna. But it’s been carefully restored. Last year it was on loan at the National Gallery, and it’s the highlight of the Delft show. The image shows an artist sitting at his easel with his back to us painting the Muse of History, who is holding a volume of Herodotos and a trumpet (a symbol of fame). The artist is wearing an antique costume: a jacket with strips of black cloth beneath which you can see his white shirt, baggy black pantaloons, red stockings, a large black beret. He’s just put down the first strokes on his canvas: the laurel wreath crowning the young Muse. Although we can’t see his face, this must surely be Vermeer himself. On the table in front of the model, a mysterious mask looks up. Might this be the actual face of Vermeer? It’s the one painting of his that he wouldn’t sell.

In an earlier large painting, The Procuress, from Dresden (one of only three extant Vermeers the artist dated, from 1656, it’s left Germany for the first time in 200 years), a mysterious grinning onlooker, maybe a musician, watches from the side while the prostitute’s business deal with her client is being settled. He’s dressed just like the artist in The Art of Painting. Is this another Vermeer joke? Vermeer had 10 children — is the prostitute one of his many daughters?

It’s too bad these two ironically related paintings aren’t in the same room so you could compare the two possible self-portraits. I’ve always thought Vermeer painted the same woman in the National Gallery’s Woman Holding a Balance and the Met’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (two of his most inward-looking figures). They were also hung too many rooms apart to compare.

Let me get the rest of my complaints out of the way. The layout of the show is frustrating. Objects seem to be displayed both thematically and chronologically, but not consistently one way or the other. The large Procuress painting is one you want to step back from, but it’s hanging in one of the exhibit’s narrowest bottlenecks — you can hardly get by, let alone step back. And at least two Vermeers are so badly lit, in the current trendy spotlighting, that crucial features are obliterated by shadows. You can see neither the uncanny source of light in the upper left-hand corner of Woman Holding a Balance nor the crowning top of the step-gable of the house in Little Street in Delft that gives the scene its heartbreaking combination of intimate familiarity and monumentality. Haven’t museum installation designers ever heard of indirect lighting?

The most indispensable Vermeer to a show about Delft is not on display: the magnificent and beloved View of Delft. The Hague’s Maurithuis Museum lent it to the National Gallery five years ago. Its absence here compromises this show’s central idea. There are views of Delft by Fabritius (his extraordinary little trompe l’œil probably intended to be viewed in a perspective box), Van Goyen, Van der Poel, Bisschop, Vroom, and Vosmaer. But where’s the transcendent achievement, the place where imagination on the highest level transforms the literal?

The combination of Vermeer and “Blockbuster” is also a paradox. Vermeer is the poet of contemplation, of profound quietude. Most of his paintings are very small, but even the large ones depict the very act of contemplation: a woman opening a window; a woman playing a lute, or a keyboard; a woman who happens to be standing in front of a painting of the Last Judgment and holding up a scale; Martha and Mary thinking about the visitor to their house, Jesus. If the artist in The Art of Painting is concentrating on his model, the model is contemplating her own role in this artistic enterprise. Even the prostitute in The Procuress maintains a certain inwardness.

If you love Vermeer, though, you’re in a bind. No reproduction has ever captured the uncanny quality of his light (“Look at that light!” a man next to me kept exclaiming). But you could travel far and wide and still not see all the paintings. So you have to be grateful for a show that gathers numerous works in one location. Then again, how can you contemplate the contemplative while you’re elbowing your way through the crowd or hearing dozens of rented audio guides chirping around you like so many crickets? There’s no satisfactory solution.

Here, at least, are 15 Vermeers for the first time in the same place. All five of the Met’s, of course, are present, and it’s good to get a fresh look at them in fresh company: The Lady with the Lute and the Portrait of a Young Girl across the room from the National Gallery’s radiant Girl in the Red Hat; the bizarre (and very Catholic) Allegory of the Faith looking out at the richly emblematic Art of Painting; The Sleeping Maid, an image of untroubled negligence, right next to The Procuress; and happily a little isolated, the Met’s greatest Vermeer, Young Woman with Water Jug, with her look of blissful concentration.

It’s also illuminating to see so many of Vermeer’s earliest paintings. There’s the huge and touching Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (from Edinburgh). And the newly cleaned Diana and Her Companions (from the Hague), which reveals that the inappropriately Italianate aqua sky was not Vermeer’s, and that the painting is much darker (literally) than anyone had thought. Suddenly, the unhappy figure of Callisto stands out against Vermeer’s darker background instead of being washed out by the brightness.

Adjacent to each other are Vermeer’s chilly “pendants,” the two flat late paintings of women standing and playing the virginal (from London). Their surreal clarity becomes more fascinating in the same room with The Allegory of the Faith and The Art of Painting. It’s as if Vermeer had suddenly prefigured — and surpassed — Magritte.

Perhaps the biggest crowd gathered around the newly cleaned and glittering The Glass of Wine (from Berlin), with the ominous gentleman in the gorgeous gray cape and broad-brimmed hat hovering above a woman in a dazzling scarlet and gold dress who is finishing a glass of wine. Light comes around and through an open stained-glass window, so the entire room, with its dark orange-and-blue checkerboard tiles, is suffused with a roseate glow.

On the table is a beautiful still life (porcelain pitcher, Oriental carpet, sheets of music); next to the table, a chair is turned away, with a blue cushion on which rests a lute. Those tiles are in dizzying perspective. The man and the woman are really also part of the still life. The whole configuration has the bewitching instability of a still life by Cézanne (just trot over to the Met’s Impressionist gallery and look at Cézanne’s great Still Life with Eggplant and Ginger Jar).

There’s also one tantalizing surprise: another painting, a little one, of a woman seated at the virginal, that belongs to a Brussels collector, Baron Freddy Rolin. It’s not in the catalogue. Its long-time attribution to Vermeer fell into question years ago. Now new tests prove that the paint is from the 17th-century and that the rare ground ultramarine pigment found in the painting of the wall is almost unique to Vermeer. The worst part of the painting, the girl’s face, was evidently retouched later, and who else could have painted the fabulous folds of the young girl’s skirt?

Even without Vermeer this show would be a treasure. The five known paintings of Carel Fabritius — the 32-year-old disciple of Rembrandt who was killed in that gunpowder explosion — are all here, including his two revealing and moving self-portraits (dashing and seductive at 26, more staid and ironic at 32, already remarried after his first wife and child had died); the brilliantly painted Sentry (a soldier wearing a gleaming helmet, asleep with on the job), which you’d otherwise have to go to Schwerin to see; the exquisite little painting of the chained goldfinch; and a possible drawing by him of Jacob and Rachel Meeting at the Well.

Ten of the best De Hoochs are here (two more will join the show in London), including the highlight of the De Hooch exhibit at Hartford two years ago, the one from the Rijksmuseum with the touching image of a mother with her child’s head in her lap (she’s looking for lice). There’s a brilliant church interior by Emmanuel de Witte, with a dog relieving himself against a column. And some enchanting floral paintings by Balthasar van der Ast, whose Vase of Flowers by a Window includes some sumptuously painted seashells.

The 15 (or 16) Vermeers at the Met are not the only Vermeers in New York. As you leave the exhibit, you see photos of the three Vermeers at the Frick Collection, with instructions how to make the 10-minute walk down Fifth Avenue to 70th Street. The Frick now has all its Vermeers in a front vestibule. Girl Interrupted at Her Music has what must be the same porcelain jug as the one in The Procuress (this is the first time these paintings have ever been in the same city). The pearl earring in the Mistress and Maid painting is one of Vermeer’s most luminous. And the ravishing, touching Officer and Laughing Girl might just be my favorite Vermeer of all.

A display at the Frick offers some fascinating information. In 1887, Henry Marquand bought The Woman with the Water Pitcher for $800. Five years later Isabella Stewart Gardner bought The Concert (oh, where is it now?) for $5000. By 1911, Henry Frick had to pay $225,000 for his Officer and Girl. Collectors caught on pretty fast.

Since the Gardner theft, the only Vermeers left in America are in New York and Washington. For the next few months, there’ll be a particularly poignant urgency for Bostonians who love his paintings to head south.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Thursday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., on Friday and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and on Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. You will not need a special-admission ticket for “Vermeer and the Delft School,” but we do recommend that you arrive as early as possible in the day, since the show will be crowded.

Issue Date: March 29-April 5, 2001