For the 47th episode of Reading the Art World, host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, about "Vermeer's Afterlives," published by Princeton University Press.

Vermeer's Afterlives traces how Vermeer, who died in 1675 and was largely forgotten within decades, was reconstructed by the critics, forgers, poets, and novelists who encountered his work over the following two centuries. Yeazell argues that the quiet, enigmatic Vermeer we revere was shaped as much by the process of recovery as by the paintings themselves: by the order in which his canvases were reattributed, by the near-absence of biographical record, and by the frameworks critics brought to an artist they were meeting for the first time.

The conversation moves through those afterlives in full: Théophile Thoré, the French journalist who encountered Vermeer in The Hague in 1842 and assembled a catalogue—more than three-quarters of which no longer holds—but whose act of naming shaped what Vermeer would become; Han Van Meegeren, whose forged Supper at Emmaus was declared the greatest Vermeer ever painted because it supplied a scholarly gap critics had convinced themselves was waiting to be filled; and the writers who have tried to narrate the stories his paintings leave untold. The conversation closes on Proust, who Yeazell argues grasped what most literary respondents missed: Vermeer's paintings stage acts of looking, not storytelling.

For anyone interested in Dutch Golden Age painting, the history of artistic reception, or how a body of work accumulates meaning across time and discipline, this episode is essential listening.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. Her books include "Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names" and "Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel," both published by Princeton University Press. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.

PURCHASE THE BOOK
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691277820/vermeers-afterlives

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"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.

Music composed by Bob Golden