A First Glimpse of Vermeer and European Masterpieces
My journey with Vermeer began not in a gallery, but in the flickering light of cinema. When I first watched Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), I found myself drawn into the quiet world the film evoked - the shadows, the silence, and the stillness, altogether. It was the atmosphere that compelled me to seek out the real painting. From that moment, Vermeer just a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, but an artist who seemed to speak directly to me.
What holds me still is his language of colour: the yellows and the blues. They create figures poised between stillness and breath, as if time itself had paused to look more closely. In The Milkmaid, the simple act of pouring seems eternal, vibrating with motion even in stillness. And in Girl with a Pearl Earring, where nothing moves, there is nevertheless a stirring, the quiet drama of a glance that lingers long after you look away.
That longing to see Vermeer’s work in person stayed with me, until 2021 when the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane brought Allegory of the Catholic Faith as part of European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Johannes Vermeer
The Netherlands 1632 - 1675
Allegory of the Catholic Faith
Oil on Canvas
Standing before Allegory of the Catholic Faith was unlike looking at any reproduction or photograph. The canvas held a gravity that no screen or page could convey. A curtain pulled aside, a woman seated upon a globe, a glass sphere suspended from the ceiling, the whole composition felt both staged and alive, as if I had stepped into a theatre where faith itself was being performed.
The room within the painting is layered with symbols: the crucifix, the chalice, the apple at her feet, the crushed serpent. Yet beyond their theological weight, it was the stillness of the figure that caught me. The way her gaze lifted upward, her hand pressed to her breast, her robe folding into blue shadows that seemed to breathe. The checkerboard floor beneath her felt like an anchor to earth, while the globe and sphere pulled the eye upward, beyond the material world.
Walking away from the painting, I carried with me not just the image, but the feeling of its presence, the hush it cast, the way it seemed to breathe in silence. For me, that is the gift of Vermeer: he shows that stillness can hold infinite depth, that light can carry emotion, that a figure caught in time can still move us profoundly.
In my own work, I return often to these same tensions, the physical and the metaphysical, the still and the stirring, the visible and the unseen. Perhaps that is why Vermeer lingers for me, not as a distant master of the past, but as a quiet companion in the present.
PS – I must admit, I didn’t enjoy the crowd pressing around me while I tried to stand still with the painting. Some moments deserve a little more silence.