This spring, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I stood once more in entrance of “The Milkmaid,” returning 33 years after that day in Lagos to her humility, her solidity and the ongoingness of her home work. I find it irresistible — I really like her — at least I ever did. It was she who impressed Wisława Szymborska’s epigrammatic poem “Vermeer” (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak from the Polish):

So lengthy as that girl from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and focus
retains pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s finish.

The curators of the Rijksmuseum have introduced collectively, in a much-praised exhibition, the largest number of paintings by Vermeer ever assembled, 28 of the surviving 35 or so typically agreed to be by him. It is a feat of coordination by the organizers and of generosity by the lenders, a gathering unlikely to be repeated on this technology at such a scale.

But I had not been eager on seeing the exhibition, and the the reason why not started to build up. The complete run of tickets, some 450,000 of them, bought out inside a few weeks of the opening, and even when I did handle to get one, the galleries have been positive to be crowded. I used to be additionally skeptical of the bluntly slim focus of the exhibition: a portray by Vermeer, adopted by one other, adopted by one other; most profitable exhibitions want extra context than this. But what was actually starting to grate on me was the breathless essential acclaim. The identify Vermeer is, by now, a shorthand for creative excellence and a lot of the reward for the exhibition seemed like emotional shorthand too. Greatness, perfection, sublimity: the acceptable vocabulary for a sure sort of cultural expertise. Those who had seen the present have been envied by those that hadn’t. That it represented a “once in a lifetime” expertise was taken as gospel. (And but, what number of of our greatest encounters with artwork have occurred in a minor museum on a quiet day? What second, absolutely inhabited, isn’t “once in a lifetime”?) The concept that the photographs have been fantastic had someway gotten combined up with the dogma that the photographs have been nothing however fantastic. Amid all this rapturous consensus, essential dissent was onerous to return by.

But some Dutch pals organized entry for me, weakening my resolve. Then, Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis (dwelling of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and one of the main museum lenders to the exhibition), invited me to stroll by means of the exhibition along with her after hours. Well, refusal at that time would have been absurd. Late in the afternoon on March 13, joined by a pal, we entered the exhibition. The final wave of common guests was ushered out, and there we have been, three fortunate viewers, with 28 Vermeers.

He was not prolific: He is assumed to have made as few as 42 work in all. It’s cheap to imagine, as artwork historians did for a very long time, that this gradual price of manufacturing was a consequence of a notably meticulous method. But X-rays and infrared imaging present that he made swift underpaintings and only a few preparatory drawings. So what was he doing with all that further time? For one factor, he had a day job as an artwork supplier, the career he inherited from his father. For one other, he was himself father to as many as 15 youngsters (11 of whom outlived him). The family will need to have been noisy. Against the implied backdrop of that noise, the astonishing and self-possessed photos arrive, two or three of them a 12 months. These are photos that appear to be doing issues with gentle that no photos had ever carried out earlier than. The artwork historian Lawrence Gowing describes it as a sure heedlessness of topic, a sure faithfulness to pure look: “Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light.”