Nicholas Mulroy

Everything is terrible and it’s Vermeer’s birthday (and Maradona’s 60th) today, so here’s something lovely from the Dutch master. There’s such a combination of stillness and vitality here, of the routine and the monumental, as the morning light seems to pour out of the picture. Look how the human detail in the foreground seems to accentuate the size of the city buildings across the water. And look at the water’s surface: an utter miracle of shade and texture. You can almost feel it running through your fingers. The detail across the buildings is the work of care, attention, and a touch of genius; the way the sun dapples the church tower and the yellow between the two buildings on the right seems like alchemy. This is a love letter to his adopted city, whose proportions he reimagines for the sake of harmony, but also to the way light transforms our worlds and can turn the everyday into something noble. This is the work that, in an uncharacteristic attack of brevity, Proust called “the most beautiful painting in the world”, and has at its heart a human resistance to fleeing time and an attempt to savour the things we hold dear: time, memory, and transcendent beauty.