Rembrandt vs Vermeer: The Titans of Dutch Painting

Following the wild success of our previous cultural combat events – Verdi vs Wagner, Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë and Shakespeare vs Milton – Intelligence Squared turned to the two greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age: Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Rembrandt van Rijn is the best known of all the Dutch masters. His range was vast, from landscapes to portraits to Biblical scenes; he revolutionised every medium he handled, from oil paintings to etchings and drawings. His vision encompassed every element of life – the sleeping lion; the pissing baby; the lacerated soles of the returned prodigal son.

Making the case for him in this debate wass Simon Schama. For him Rembrandt is humanity unedited: rough, raw, violent, manic, vain, greedy and manipulative. Formal beauty was the least of his concerns, argues Schama, yet he attains beauty through his understanding of the human condition, including to be sure, his own.

But for novelist Tracy Chevalier it can all get a little exhausting. Rembrandt’s paintings, she believes – even those that are not his celebrated self-portraits – are all about himself. Championing Vermeer, she claimed that his charm lies in the very fact that he absents himself from his paintings. As a result they are less didactic and more magical than Rembrandt’s, giving the viewer room to breathe.

Chevalier has been obsessed with Vermeer since the age of 19, when she first saw his Girl with a Pearl Earring. The girl’s startled eyes and luscious, inviting mouth produce a tantalising sense of mystery and contradiction.

An other-worldly mystery also veils Vermeer’s Delft street scenes and interiors. Apparently so everyday, they are lifted to a higher sphere by the indirect gaze and the turned back, all bathed in that fuzzy, filmic Vermeer veneer. And so often they, too, ask a question. Who wrote the letter that the woman in blue reads so attentively? Who does the girl in the gold jacket strum her guitar for? The questions are never answered but we are lured back again and again in search of an answer.

Which of these two titans is the greater master – Rembrandt or Vermeer?

Image credits:

“Allegory of the Catholic Faith” (c. 1670-1672), by Johannes Vermeer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (www.metmuseum.org)

“Christ on the Cross” (1631), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Parish Church, Le Mas d’Angenais, France

“A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)” (1654), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. © The National Gallery, London

“Portrait of Margaretha de Geer”, Wife of Jacob Trip (c. 1661), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. © The National Gallery, London

“View of Delft” (c. 1660-1661), by Johannes Vermeer. Mauritshuis, The Hague

“A View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654” (1654), by Egbert van der Poel. © The National Gallery, London

“The Night Watch” (1642), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

“Self-Portrait with Two Circles” (c. 1659-60), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. © English Heritage

“The Procuress” (1656), by Johannes Vermeer. © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, Alte Meister

“The Jewish Bride” (1665-1669), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

“Woman Sitting Half-Dressed beside a Stove” (1658), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1918 (www.metmuseum.org)

“The Guitar Player” (c. 1670-72) by Johannes Vermeer. © English Heritage

“The Art of Painting” (c. 1665-68), by Johannes Vermeer. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

“The Milkmaid” (c. 1657-58), by Johannes Vermeer. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

“Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” (c. 1657–59) by Johannes Vermeer. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1665), by Johannes Vermeer. Mauritshuis, The Hague

“Olga with Pearl Earring” (2010), by Flickr user “David Blackwell.”.

“The girl with the pearl earring” (2008) by Flickr user “Plutone (NL)”.

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” (2012), by Flickr user “Susan LeBlanc”. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/basselop…)

Featuring

Sir Simon Schama

Award-winning historian and broadcaster, whose latest book is Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations
Tracy Chevalier

Historical novelist

Chair

Tim Marlow

Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA

Speakers are subject to change.

Speakers

Chair

Tim Marlow

Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA

Tim Marlow is the Director of Artistic Programmes at the Royal Academy . Over the last decade, he has worked with some of the most important and influential artists of our time including Chuck Close, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo. He is also an award-winning radio and television broadcaster and has presented over 100 documentaries on British Television, including Tim Marlow on… and The Art of the Portrait.

Featuring

Sir Simon Schama

Award-winning historian and broadcaster, whose latest book is Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University and Contributing Editor of the Financial Times. He previously taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard Universities. He is the author of 19 books, including The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Rembrandt's Eyes; A History of Britain trilogy; The American Future: A History, and two volumes of The Story of the Jews. He is the writer-presenter of 60 documentaries on art, history and literature for BBC television including films on Tolstoy, John Donne and Rembrandt as well as multi-part award-winning series including A History of Britain and The Power of Art which won an International Emmy for the film on Bernini. Most recently his History of Now series aired on BBC2 in November-December 2022. His art criticism for The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism in 1996 and he won the NCR prize for non-fiction for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, the W.H. Smith Literary Award for Landscape and Memory, and the National Book Critics Circle prize for non-fiction for Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. He has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for Literature; the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement; and the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in historical sciences from the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. He has curated exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, collaborated with and contributed to catalogues for shows by Cy Twombly, Alex Katz, Christo and Sally Mann and most recently worked with Cai Guo-Qiang on his Odyssey and Homecoming Retrospective at the Palace Museum, Beijing. His work has been translated into twenty three languages. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, his twentieth book, is published in May 2023.

Tracy Chevalier

Historical novelist

American historical novelist. She is the author of eleven novels, including A Single Thread, Remarkable Creatures and Girl with a Pearl Earring, an international bestseller that has sold over five million copies and been made into a film, a play and an opera.

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