‘In the museum at The Hague, a superb and very singular landscape arrests all visitors and vividly impresses artists and connoisseurs.’ The radical journalist and art critic Théophile Thoré, writing in 1866, so described Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft (c 1660), on display at the Mauritshuis since its opening in 1822. The Dutch painter died at the age of forty-three in 1675, and his oeuvre consists solely of oil paintings – under forty of them. Although ignored in the 18th century, Vermeer was a successful artist in his time: he enjoyed the support and patronage of a prominent Delft couple and served twice as dean of the painters’ guild in Delft. The way that his paintings of daily life seem to stop time and capture light continues to fascinate in terms established in the 19th century. It is to Thoré that we owe Vermeer’s recovery from oblivion. It is also, as Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Vermeer’s Afterlives demonstrates, to Thoré and his contemporaries that we owe the conception of Vermeer’s works as art for art’s sake.

Thoré made the View of Delft and its maker famous outside the Netherlands in ways that still influence artists, poets and novelists. He described Vermeer as unknown and fundamentally unknowable. Like Thoré, Marcel Proust was also something of a maniac for Vermeer. Proust’s last sortie from his home before his death was to see the View of Delft, which he declared ‘the most beautiful painting on earth’. A famous scene in A la recherche du temps perdu, composed after that visit, features Proust’s alter ego Bergotte expressing remorse for not having written more like Vermeer painted. Falling ill before the painting, Bergotte fixates on a ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ (small patch of yellow wall). ‘My last books are too dry,’ Bergotte laments, ‘I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint.’ Repeating the phrase – petit pan de mur jaune – to himself, he collapses. Art for art’s sake is an art to die for.

Proust’s description of Bergotte’s death also refers to ‘the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer’. Extensive publications based on archival research notwithstanding, it is still popular to speak of the