If you follow the national and international news, you may be forgiven for concluding that current political, economic, and military developments are the most important things in this turning world. Next to them, the ordinary activities of daily life may seem slight, undramatic, and banal. But two paintings, both of them focused on everyday life, suggest otherwise.
Johannes Vermeer’s A View of Delft (c. 1660-1663) is by common consensus a great work of art. When Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, viewed the painting in a museum in the Hague, he pronounced it “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Over the past two centuries, the collective estimate of art critics and historians has not been far behind.
A View of Delft is a cityscape. The painting portrays the city of Delft, Holland, as seen from a southeastern perspective. From the position of the sun, it is evident that the time is early morning. In the foreground is the harbor, normally a bustling venue, but at this hour it is nearly empty, with only a stationary barge, two herring boats, and a few sailing vessels occupying its waters. In the middle distance, the walls of the city’s brownstone and brick buildings are darkened by shadows. Its famous gates and fortifications, one of Delft’s distinctive features, are also enshadowed, their rough textures rendered by dots of paint. Higher up, however, the morning sunlight bathes the city’s roofs and steeples. Most striking is the white spire of Nieuwe Kirk, where Vermeer was baptized, a spiritual center of a thriving commercial city. Above the city are scudding clouds.
As the critic Karl Schutz has noted, A View of Delft, for all its masterly illusionism, has the feeling of a snapshot. Unlike a tranquil pastoral landscape, such as John Constable might have painted, Vermeer’s picture conveys a sense of activity frozen in time, an illusion created in part by the momentary ripples in the waters of the harbor. And though the painting possesses a serenity of its own, it is that of normal, everyday life. That effect is further enhanced by the presence of human figures in the immediate foreground, near the water. On the left, two well-dressed burghers, accompanied by two women, are waiting for the barge; not far away, two women in peasant attire are engaged in conversation. I have a reproduction of A View of Delft in my study, and whenever I stop to look at it, I am drawn to the image of those men and women and the activity they represent: casual human interaction, unhindered by the currents of political and social conflict.
James McIntosh Patrick’s The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window (1948) conveys a similar impression. McIntosh Patrick’s paintings are well-known in his native Scotland, and this picture is his most iconic work. Set in the city of Dundee, where McIntosh Patrick lived and worked, it balances a sense of intimacy against a panoramic vista.
It’s late afternoon. Long, parallel shadows thrown by a wrought-iron fence traverse the lawn in the foreground. At the gate of the fence stands the painter’s wife, who is returning from her errands. On the street, a cyclist (identified as the artist’s son) is pedaling past. A greengrocer making deliveries in his horse-drawn cart has momentarily paused. His horse stands still. On the sidewalk on the far side of the street, a man is walking his dogs, and a mother is pushing a stroller. Beyond them lies a wide sward known as Magdalen Green. Above it, the Tay Railway Bridge winds like a serpent above the Tay Estuary, where a cargo ship is making its slow passage across the water. Two locomotives pulling trains send white plumes of smoke into the overcast sky.
As the essayist Chris Arthur has observed, McIntosh Patrick’s painting creates a compelling illusion of arrested activity. In Arthur’s words, the picture leaves “a strong impression of capturing a moment.” The figures and objects in motion in the painting, particularly the cyclist, the dog walker, the cargo ship, and the steaming locomotives, though “captive in paint,” are “replete with a sense of movement.” McIntosh Patrick’s art “emphasizes the interruption of a flow.”
That it does. But like A View of Delft, it also honors the beauty waiting to be discovered in daily activities and common things. It is no accident that I also have a framed reproduction of McIntosh Patrick’s painting on my wall, where it quietly reminds me of the dignity of everyday life. The social, political, and economic ethos within which these paintings were created was no less fraught than our own, if not more so. But just as Zen monastics train themselves daily to remain in the present and to attend respectfully to ordinary things, the creators of these timeless paintings invert the news media’s conventional hierarchies of interest and value, giving precedence not to the mighty, the rich, and the warlike but to decent ordinary life.
Karl Schutz, Vermeer: The Complete Works. 45th ed. (Taschen, 2021).
Chris Arthur, What Is It Like to Be Alive? (Eastover Press, 2024), 237-258.