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.
Listen to the full episode here: